(upbeat music) - Welcome to "A Shot of AG."

My name is Rob Sharkey.

I'm a fifth generation farmer from just outside of Bradford, Illinois.

I started a podcast, which led into an XM radio show, which led into a national television show, which led into me being here today.

But today, today is not about me.

Today is about Barry Fisher.

How you doing Barry?

- I'm good.

How are you doing?

- I'm doing pretty good.

Ellisville?

I don't know where that's at?

- It's about halfway between Peoria and Macomb.

- [Rob] Okay.

Is it very big?

- No, I think there's like 150 people.

- Yeah.

150 people?

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- That's a small gathering.

- Yeah, well, it is, but it has history.

I guess, back early on when Illinois was developed, it was the state capital for a short period of time.

- [Rob] Ellisville?

- Yeah, yep.

It's on Spoon River, and this is what I've been told.

Don't hold it as gospel.

- Does it have a Casey's?

- Oh no, no.

- Dollar store?

- It has a post office and one stop sign.

- No bar?

- No bar.

- Really?

No church?

- No store.

There is one church, one small church.

- If you have a church you're supposed to have a bar, right?

Isn't there a law about that?

- I don't know, Ellisville is exempt of that law, apparently.

- You're a third generation farmer?

- Yep.

- So you've been farming all your life, grew up as a farm kid?

- Yep, yep, yep, yep.

- Is that all you ever wanted to do?

- I went to school to be a mechanic, and about the same time I enrolled in school, a neighbor retired and said, hey, would you like to farm a farm?

And so history was made.

- Okay.

So, your family farm?

- Yes, yes.

Family farm.

- You're farming that too?

- Yes, yes, yep, yep.

- Okay.

Do you remember what year it was started?

- '43.

1943.

- That's, as far as generational farms, that's not that old.

- No, it's not, it's not.

My grand folks moved up from Indiana in the 40s, bought a piece of ground down where Camp Ellis was developed.

The War was still going on and it expanded.

They told them that they couldn't move there, that the ground was being seized and so they moved up to where we are now.

- The ground was being seized?

- Yeah.

- By the Germans?

- By the government, the government.

- Oh, I was gonna say, I don't remember that in the history books.

- Well, they literally come in, they developed the Camp and said, this is, I guess it was early eminent domain.

They took the ground.

- [Rob] Things were different then, weren't they?

- Yes, they were.

- Yeah, it was all about, well, actually we were worried about Germans coming in, so stuff like that happened.

- Yes, yes, yep, yep.

- Was that good ground?

The Campground?

- It was river bottom ground.

It was decent farm ground.

- Okay, alright.

I mean, so your farm now, tell me what you're raising?

- We raise corn and soybeans.

We have hay.

We just seeded down an alfalfa field, we put oats down for a cover crop.

We run about 45, 50 Black Angus cattle and a cow calf operation.

We lamb out between 85 and 90 ewes each year, raising Easter lambs.

My daughter has a small chicken flock, we sell some eggs to neighbors and stuff.

We have two llamas, an alpaca, and dogs, and cats.

- Okay, first of all, not everybody watching knows what a cow calf operation is.

- Okay.

We have what they call brood cows.

We breed our cows during the summer, they calve in March, we raise the calves up to weaning weight, which is about 500 pounds.

We take 'em up to the local sale barn and then somebody buys them and either backgrounds 'em or puts 'em in a feed lot, and raises 'em until they're ready for slaughter, for consumption.

- Okay, I would say through most of Illinois agriculture, I mean the corn, soybeans, wheat, oats, cattle, not unusual.

Is there many other sheep farmers in your area?

- There really isn't a lot of commercial sheep.

There's a lot of show sheep.

Fulton County's a very active show, hogs, cattle, sheep, in our County.

There's a surprising amount of show sheep, but we're one of the few commercial sheep farms in Fulton County.

- That gets competitive, right?

- Oh, it's very competitive.

The people in our County will be in the top numbers down at the State Fair, regularly.

We have several families that go to a lot of the national shows, so it's a very, very competitive hobby.

- [Rob] Yeah, you ever worry about being shivved, it's that that competitive?

- No (laughs) we were never in that elite group of show people.

- You might get there, you know what I'm saying?

So do you remember, by chance, the Grand Champion sheep down at the State Fair?

What the dollar number was?

- No, I don't, but it's phenomenal.

- It's huge, right?

- It is.

- The hog is like six figures, what they sell for, so, I mean, you gotta watch out.

- However, they pay top dollars for those animals too.

- There's always two sides, isn't there.

- Yeah, there's a lot of money spent on the show animals.

- So the sheep, is that something that you got into, or was it always part of the farm?

- I was born and raised with sheep.

My family had sheep, as far as I can remember.

There's pictures of us as kids bottle feeding lambs.

It's just in the blood, it's something we've always done.

- Okay, when you're doing something and you're raising something that not many other people are doing, you have a hard time selling it.

I mean, where's your market at?

- Well we have, over the years, have learned that there's a real demand for milk-fed, meaty little lambs at Easter.

And more and more of the ethnic holidays, the ethnic people use them at, like we do a turkey at Christmas or Thanksgiving.

So we've discovered a long, long time ago, that we need to shoot for a 45 to 55 pound lamb, ten days to two weeks before Easter.

And now, the American Easter is different than the Greek Easter.

They can be the same day, or they can be a month apart.

And those two days are our prime target for the best price that we get out of our lambs.

- For Easter and the Greek Easter?

- Yes.

- Okay, so that could mess you up if it was a month apart.

- But it helps because it's hard to get 90 ewes to lamb the same day, to have all the lambs ready.

And so being spread out, it gives you two times to get the ones that didn't lamb quick enough, ready to go.

Now, this year, we had a fabulous, fabulous crop.

We had 89 lambs that fit that niche market the day of the sale.

And we only end up with, I think we've got a dozen that were too small to go.

- Okay.

Is it the Peoria market?

- Actually, our local sale barn is where we go.

It's seven miles away.

We have taken lambs to Bloomington, Kankakee, Kewanee, Bourbonnais, but the buyers come to Fairview.

We wean our lambs at 10 o'clock and they're sold at 12, so there's not a lot of shrink.

- [Rob] But they're not staying here, right?

- No, they more than likely go to Chicago and then they'll end up probably in Chiappetti's, or places like that in Chicago, in the meat markets.

- That gives you a better price shooting for that day?

- Yes, usually at least double.

- Double?

- Double.

- Really?

- Yes.

- So if you sold a lamb now, half the cost it would've been on Easter?

- Correct.

Well, this Easter, we got 3 1/2 times what we normally would get, if you was to take the lambs to sell.

Thursday's our sale day, usually.

Like I said, we got 3 1/2 half times what we normally would get.

- Do all the other sheep farmers, are they aiming for that too?

- Everybody's aware of it because anybody that's got show lambs that aren't gonna be show quality, they come up to the sale.

There was probably 300 to 350 head of lambs up at the sale barn that day.

- Gotcha.

That's gotta put a lot of pressure on, not just the lambing, but your breeding schedule too, right?

- Right, right, yeah.

We've done it long enough that we know how many days from when the market is, backwards to sort and turn our rams in.

And it's usually the hottest day in August that we get the ewes all in, we check 'em out, we worm 'em, we sort 'em into groups, and then we put specific rams with specific ewes, crossbreeding to get the ideal vigor, and uniformity, and confirmation for what we want for the Easter market.

- I mean, even though it's hot though, there's a reason they call 'em rams.

- Yes.

- Yeah, they're ready to go.

- They're ready to go.

Yep, yep, yep, yep.

- It's fascinating that the market can jump that much in just hitting that holiday.

Is it like Christmastime?

- Exactly.

For the Jewish people, it's the Passover Feast.

And I'm not certain the relationship with the Greek, but I know that it's becoming a very strong market.

And there's several other, Ramadan is another one that we haven't targeted that yet.

But more of the ethnic people have holidays that they use a lamb as their meal.

- Yeah.

I've heard they're a dumb animal.

- They can be.

A sheep or a lamb will stick their head through a fence and they'll stay there until they die.

If they pull back, their ears hurt and they won't pull back.

But if you walk up there and tap 'em on the nose, or encourage 'em a little bit, they'll pop out.

They're also a very hardy animal.

You've probably heard the saying that a sick sheep is a dead sheep because they're so healthy that when they show sign of being ill, they're almost to the point of no return.

- Ah, I got it.

Okay, so they're hardy little creatures.

Does the weather affect them that much?

- Not really.

Not really.

- They got wool.

- They've got wool.

- Stuff's warm.

- It's warm, but it's insulation.

Yesterday afternoon, we were out mowing around stuff, they're all laying in the shade of the trees, or in the shade of the buildings.

They seem to tolerate it.

When it's hot, hot weather affects you and me.

- You're darn right it does.

- They'll be laying in the shade keeping cool, and then they'll go out in the evening and start eating grass again.

- Okay, you got a good thing going, and it's all supply and demand.

Any concern about the solar farms that are popping up?

Because the byproduct of that is you got this big fenced-in area, and all of a sudden people are like, hey, why don't we throw some sheep in there?

- I've drove by several of those.

The problem with that is they don't build 'em high enough because a sheep loves to rub, they love to itch and rub stuff.

And I'm not certain how compatible they'd be with all that low lying edges and stuff, but there is a potential.

- The thing is, they should put the solar panels up higher, but don't tell 'em that because we gotta get high prices for our sheep.

- There we go.

There we go.

- Yeah, they can make money off solar and the sun.

Give us our wool.

- And there's places out West.

We get a sheep magazine where they're using them to graze down firebreaks in different places, to control brush and stuff.

We mow all of our barn lots, so we close gates, put some temporary fences up, and mow all of our barn lots with the sheep.

- Yeah, that sure beats a mower.

Gas prices, yo.

That's what I'm saying.

Do you have any kids that are interested in coming back?

- I have a son that's an experimental mechanic at Caterpillar, and then I have a daughter that's a parts manager at a local tractor implement dealer, and she really likes the livestock.

Like I said, she's got a small chicken flock.

She bought some registered Rambouillet ewes.

The wool is high quality, and she sells some fleeces for the spinners stuff and that's what they use for knitting and stuff.

- That's a good point because everybody thinks what they see on a movie, right, is you're growing the sheep for the fleece.

Do you shear 'em?

- We shear 'em.

My sheep are commercial sheep, they're meat sheep.

Their wool is very low quality.

Here the last four or five years, the wool has been worth a nickel a pound.

There's a checkoff, like there is on corn and soybeans and cattle.

There was a 3 1/2 cent checkoff, so I was getting a penny and a half a pound for the wool.

My sheep usually yield about 10 pounds, and the last time I sheared it cost me $7 to get 'em sheared.

It takes a lot of sheep to make that work.

- That's man's work, right?

- Oh, it is.

- You have somebody come in and do that, right?

- Believe it or not, we have a little gal that comes from Forreston, down and shears our sheep.

- [Rob] Really?

I thought they had to lift 'em up.

- Well, she does the shearing.

We set up a sheep tub and I set the sheep in front of her, and she shears it and we take the wool from her.

And she comes down and sets up about 9 o'clock.

We take a lunch break, and by four o'clock she's sheared 120 head and is gone.

- I'll let that go 'cause she's doing all the work, but we take a lunch break.

- Yes.

Well, we all take a lunch break.

- Yeah.

We get it.

(laughs) What do we have here?

- That is my first tractor.

It's a model of a 4020.

The body of it is a toy tractor that I and my brothers played with in sandbox when we were kids.

- [Rob] Oh, that's not ERTL?

- No.

Well, it may be, but it's from the late 50s.

And I found a kid that I went to school in high school, that rebuilt 'em.

- That's all you need right there.

The steering still works.

- The tires and the sunroof are new, but the body of it is original, is the first toy we had in the sandbox.

And then it happened to be, the first tractor that I bought was a 4020.

- Let's do a little inside baseball on 4020s.

How many reverses do they have?

- Actually, they have four.

- Okay, I thought it was a trick between two and three, but now you're saying four.

- There's three.

If you know how to grind it, you can put the fourth one in it.

- We at "A Shot of AG" don't advise you grinding anything.

- No, it's too fast, but that's something that I learned going through my diesel tech program, that for every range, there is a reverse.

There's four ranges, and there is an available reverse in each one of those ranges.

- Our 4020, we couldn't.

We had a 3020, though, that you could get it back in the other one.

All right, let's get back to.

You're involved in a lot of stuff, like community minded.

Why do you do that?

- Just the way we were raised up.

My mom and dad were 4-H leaders.

They supported myself and my four brothers through all the things, the 4-H, the FFA, sports.

My wife and I were 4-H leaders.

We're active in the church.

- [Rob] Do you remember the, what is it?

The motto, the saying?

I pledge my.

- I pledge my head to clearer thinking, my heart to better loyalty, My hands to greater service.

- My hands to greater service, for my club, my community.

- And my country.

- My universe.

- Yeah, it's been too long.

It's been too long.

Something my dad started years ago, in late fall we clean out the shop, set up, and we have a community wiener roast.

We've had 70, 80 people show up, sat around the campfire.

- 70, 80 people, you said there was 150 people that lived in the town.

- But we don't live in the town.

A matter of fact, we live in the middle of three towns that have populations.

- Can't make up your mind, huh?

- Well, we have an Ellisville address.

We have a Fiatt phone number, and we're in the Fairview Fire Protection District.

- Oh, okay.

That used to be a big deal with the phone numbers, because we were the same way.

We had a Bradford address, but we lived in Bureau County, and then it's long distance if I wanted to call my neighbor, literally a mile down the road.

- Exactly.

Exactly.

- Y'all kids don't even know what we're talking about now.

- How many rings was your phone?

- I'm older than that, or I'm younger than that.

I did not have the party lines, but my sister's talked about it.

- Our was two rings, my grandmother was three rings, and neighbor up the road was one ring.

And you literally had a party line, you could pick up and talk to the neighbors, or listen in on a conversation.

- I think my mom did that.

I think she would listen in every once in a while to the Duckworths.

I mean, she's the one person that watches the show, so I probably shouldn't rat her out.

- Hey, they all did it it.

- Yeah.

I would too.

I mean, seriously, all you do is pick it up quietly, you could hear what they're talking about.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- You're active in the Farm Bureau?

- Yes, yes, started out on a Young Farmer's committee back in the 80s, was chairman.

My wife served on the county board as a women's community chairman.

And then I've served a couple different terms.

I serve on FS boards, was an interlocking board member.

Got on the board full-time, and I'm currently in my third year as being the county president, and enjoy doing that kind of work.

Matter of fact, we have an adopted classroom that's coming from Chicago, down tomorrow, to two of the farms.

- Really?

Taking a bus?

I mean, that's a trek.

- Yes, yes.

- Is it because you have sheep?

- We have been doing this for several years, and partly we'd take lambs up there when we could, before COVID.

I take lambs to show 'em to the kids.

It's a parochial school and we bring a fourth grade down, and we're bringing two classes, trying to get caught up for not doing it in the past.

We'll bring a bus load down, bring the parents.

It's eye-opening for the kids, but the parents are the ones that were making progress, teaching them, explaining agricultural and livestock to the urban people.

- We used to do it.

Emily used to write to 'em, and then at the annual meeting, when you're up in Chicago, we'd go visit.

It was downtown.

For a farmer, I was not comfortable, right?

We walk in there and, of course, my mind's going stereotypes and stuff like that.

Those kids, they sat at their desk, and they were in awe of us.

They couldn't get enough of where their food come from.

They were eating up every word we said.

- Yep, yep, yep, yep.

We write this class once a once a month, send 'em up pictures.

And I gotta tell the story.

We took a lamb up, the first time we walked up there, we're walking up into a classroom.

I'm walking down there, and anybody's been around a sheep, a little lamb when it screams or bawls, sounds like a baby screaming.

And I'm walking down the hall, and this lamb starts screaming.

And literally four doors on each side of this hall opened up and teachers stepped out, what was going on?

- Oh really?

- And so then they knew that there were lambs there.

And so we were supposed to do one class, we ended up doing all the classes because they knew that there was a lamb there.

And like you said, a lot of these kids don't even have pets.

They don't have dogs or cats.

- Yeah, it's sad in a way, but it's really nice when you can go up there.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So were you able to silence the lambs?

Hilarious.

- (laughs) Yes.

- Oh, that's been a while too.

Yeah, the Farm Bureau, I was kicked out of there.

- Oh, surely not.

- It was something like that.

I don't remember, not voted in or kicked out.

I don't remember how it went.

- Did you quit paying your dues?

- No, they still take that.

They still take my dues.

Well tell 'em, hi.

- Okay.

I will, I will.

- Yeah, tell 'em I think about 'em, hopefully that they're thinking about me.

- Yep.

(both laughing) - What do you want people to know?

I mean, because you're talking to a lot of people here that are watching, that have never set foot on a farm.

What do you want 'em to know about what you do?

- Well, we live on the farm and we're stewards of the land.

We drink the water.

We have well water there, we drink the water.

We eat the cattle that we grow, we eat the lambs that we grow, we eat the chickens that we grow.

We're not gonna do anything to our livestock, or to our ground, that's not healthy, that's not sustainable.

We're stewards of our environment and we want to take care of it, protect it for the future, and for the next generations.

And in the same way, the community.

You've gotta serve on the school boards.

You've gotta serve on the township boards.

You've gotta serve on the Farm Bureau boards, to help guide and ensure that all this stuff's available for the future generations.

- Yeah, and to pass it on to your daughter, hopefully, someday.

- Yep, yep, yep, yep.

- Are you on social media?

- I do look at Facebook a little bit.

- [Rob] No TikTok?

- No TikTok.

I've never gotten on that.

- You've ever thought about it?

- I have, it just.

- You get on there and you show lambs every day, you get a huge following.

- Yep, yep.

- Yeah, okay.

Well, if people want to find you, is there a way they can do that?

- Yeah, call down to Fulton County Farm Bureau office.

- That's awesome.

I love it because anymore, everybody's like, oh yeah, my Instagram is this, and my TikTok is this.

- Nope, I guess I'm too old.

- There are a lot of worse things in the world.

- Alright, Barry Fisher from Ellisville, thank you so very much for taking the time.

I thank you so much for feeding us.

- Well, thank you.

- Yep, Barry, thank you.

- Thank you for the opportunity.

- Everybody else, we'll catch you next time.