Grays Harbor County Fair: Prepping for the show

Jul 09, 2023

Agriculture students pass down knowledge of shearing, cleaning sheep

Trinity Tafoya likely won’t pursue a future as a barber. She’s more interested in becoming a large animal veterinarian. But her role on Thursday was closer to the former occupation.

Her client was a few-month-old lamb on its way to a showing, and it squirmed in her arms like a five-year-old boy in a barber’s chair.

While her brother, Rowdie, held the lamb, Milo, Trinity guided a pair of roaring shears, lathered in WD-40, up the lamb’s neck, down its forehead, and touched up the cheeks and eyebrows. The shears nicked Milo’s skin. In five years of shearing sheep, Trinity admitted, it wasn’t her finest head-shearing job ever.

But the trim was a service in two ways: to ensure Milo, the lamb of younger 4H participant Aubrey Franklin, met coat-length requirements for the sheep show in a few hours, and to teach Franklin the nitty-gritty of prepping the animals for the critical eye of a judge.

Next fall, Trinity will attend college at Eastern Oregon University. It’s her last year of 10 in the Future Farmers of America program, and she and Rowdie, in his seventh year, want to show as many sheep as they can this summer. They already participated in their home Thurston County Fair last week, and will head to Centralia for the Southwest Washington Fair in a few weeks. Trinity will show eight lambs at the Grays Harbor County Fair this week.

It’s Franklin’s first time showing a lamb or sheep. When she met the Tafoya siblings earlier this week, they agreed to show her the ropes.

“It’s not about being the best, I mean, we still want to win, but it’s about the education we were taught when we were younger,” Rowdie said. “It’s about educating the youth of 4H and FFA,” adding that agricultural traditions have dwindled in many places in Washington.

Franklin was the pupil on Thursday, but she has ties to deep agricultural history in Grays Harbor County. She lives on the Vetter Farm near Satsop, one of the area’s initial homesteads that’s now a 400-acre spread. The farm raises cattle and grows hay, and recently, Franklin and her siblings got into sheep.

With Milo standing on a small cart, head stabilized by metal bars, Trinity reached over the lamb with the shears, showing Franklin how to pull the animal’s hide tight and run the shears at different angles to cut the wool as close as possible to the skin. That’s critical, she explained, because it exposes the animal’s figure and muscle tone more prominently for potential buyers and judges. Even small details in the lamb’s wool coat are important, Trinity said, helping Rowdie work the shears around protruding leg bones and underneath the animal. They pull the lamb off the cart, leaving scattered shavings of wool, a large, stiff brush in a bucket of water, a can of WD-40 and a small pile of poop.

But the lamb is still far from ready for show. Pens nearby hold Trinity’s already-prepped lambs, with smoothly-buzzed and glistening white coats wrapped in “sleazies” — tight synthetic garments of hot pink, bright orange and zebra patterns — to keep the sheep clean until showtime.

The difference between those lambs and Milo, at this point, is Tafoya’s secret ingredient: whitening shampoo. They spread some of the substance — which starts out purple — into Milo’s coat and, with a similar effect to removing muddy footprints from a carpet, scrub away dirt and grime until the coat sparkles.

Trinity then teaches Franklin an important final step. Reaching underneath Milo’s rear leg — the equivalent of a human armpit, she said — she swabs with a baby wipe, removing grease from a gland. A nitpicky judge, Trinity said, will scrape their nails in the area to check if any residue remained. After a rinse, Milo was ready.

The 116-pound Hampshire-Suffolk mix twisted and bleated throughout the exercise. Franklin said she was nervous that Milo might act up during the show.

“He may be friendly, but he can throw a fit,” she said.

She was sure, though, that Milo was clean.

Attendance

On Thursday, the second day of the Grays Harbor County Fair, 11,822 people passed through the gates, said Fair Manager Mike Bruner in an email Thursday night. That’s about 4,800 fewer people than attended the fair on the second day in 2022, but still the third-largest Thursday crowd since 2012. Total attendance through the first two days trails last year’s total by 3,000 people.

“But with great weather in the frecast rthrough the next two days of fair, a solid entertainment lineup and the Friday free admission hour between 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., we are still well in reach of setting another attendance record,” Bruner said.

Friday night’s headlining musical performance features local artists, Alex Mabey, Ericka Corban, and The Six Band, starting a 7 p.m. on the Pepsi Stage.

Contact reporter Clayton Franke at 406-552-3917 or [email protected].

Contact reporter Clayton Franke at 406-552-3917 or [email protected].