Tom Hodgman: 00:00
So much admiration for him, goodness, that I know his family and stuff. Yeah. There’s not a lot of people that I would consider mentors of mine that I never met.
Tom Hodgman: 00:16
So, anyway, that’s what I’m gonna do. And I’ll just, I’m gonna flip through some things as I go along.
Glenda Pereira: 00:22
And do you wanna just cut us off at 12:30? I guess, like, as you see the time get closer to that, kind of reel us both in.
Tom Hodgman: 00:31
Yeah. If we get to 12:23, never mind. Yeah. 12:23.
Glenda Pereira: 00:38
Reel us in.
Tom Hodgman: 00:38
And I’ll cut to the chase.
Colt Knight: 00:42
K. Glenda?
Glenda Pereira: 00:44
Welcome to the… were you recording all of that?
Colt Knight: 00:46
I was checking our levels.
Glenda Pereira: 00:48
You should include some of it. So welcome back to the Maine Farmcast, folks. This is Glenda Pereira here, and I’m joined by my co-host, Colt Knight. We’re on the Waldoview Farm for the day. We set up a nice little portable station here.
Glenda Pereira: 01:03
We’ve got rockstar microphones, as Colt likes to mention, so the sound should be awesome today. We’ve got awesome equipment to record, and we have a return guest. We have Tom Hodgman here from Waldoview Farm, and Tom’s going to talk to us about the Katahdin breed, which is a breed that’s actually here from the state of Maine and that I only learned about once I became a faculty here.
Colt Knight: 01:27
I’m really excited about this because when I was a graduate student in Texas, we had Frank Craddock at Texas A and M University that had this amazing history of the sheep industry in the Southwest. And now I feel like I’m gonna get a taste of the history of the sheep industry in the Northeast.
Glenda Pereira: 01:45
So Tom, you own Katahdins?
Tom Hodgman: 01:46
We do. Yep. We have a Katahdin flock here, and we’ve had them for about twenty years. We run about 90 Katahdins each summer. We breed just shy of that, around 70.
Tom Hodgman: 02:02
But let me start by just saying that Katahdins are a relatively new breed. It’s a breed of hair sheep. It’s a bit of a different-looking creature than people were used to. They started off in the 50s, and then they became a legitimate breed sometime in the 70s and the 80s. And now they’ve really flourished across the US.
Tom Hodgman: 02:27
And that’s what I wanna talk about today. The motto for Katahdins is, “A breed whose time has come.” And it’s true, but I would modify that by saying it’s a breed whose time has come: how a chance observation led to a simple idea and ultimately to one of the most important sheep breeds in America. And I will just say that that really encapsulates the story of the Katahdin breed. In 1956, a gentleman was looking through a copy of National Geographic magazine, and the article was on the US Virgin Islands.
Tom Hodgman: 03:10
And the article was “Virgin Islands Tropical Playground USA.” So you have visions of a beach and people, you know, swimming and whatever. But this gentleman noticed an image, and it was an image of a broken-down old granite concrete structure with a bunch of goats out in front, and he was herding them around onto the front area, and it’s just a brushy sort of area. And the caption on the image in the magazine said, “Goats forage where sugar barons once ruled.” This gentleman, and I can envision him, you know, having a little glass of scotch and smoking his pipe because he smoked a pipe…
Tom Hodgman: 04:00
He noticed something about this image. Those animals in the picture, those goats didn’t look like goats. There was something not right about it. And he noticed that they had tails, long pendulous tails. And he was so intrigued by that that he contacted the photographer at Nat Geo, and
Tom Hodgman: 04:28
found out where the picture was taken and anything about it. And then he ended up speaking over time with USDA in St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. And he had long chats with them, and then ultimately, he got permission to import three, what they referred to as African hair sheep. So they were referred to as African hair sheep because their origin is actually from West Africa.
Tom Hodgman: 05:01
They came to the New World during the slave trade, part of the trade triangle with Europe and North America, the Americas and Africa, where slaves would come to the New World, and then raw materials, sugar, cotton, that sort of thing, rum, would go to Europe, and then Europe would send other trade goods like processed things like chairs and, you know, those sort of textiles, things like that to Africa, along with more rum. And that was sort of the triangle that fed this. Well, in that Western passage route from Africa to the New World also came many of the, some of the livestock that they… So that’s how the breed originated in the Virgin Islands, is through this trade. But over time, several hundred years of cultivation there, and probably not a whole lot of genetic improvement, we arrived at this idea that these sheep have a potential foundation for a new idea, and that is breeding an animal that has no wool, because the individual was quite concerned with certain companies like DuPont and others making plastics and turning plastics into clothing, replacing wool. And his name was Michael Piel, and he operated the Piel Farm in Abbott, Maine, which is between Dover and Greenville.
Tom Hodgman: 06:40
And he was able to import three lambs, two ewes, one of them was white, one of them was brown, and a white ram. They were all unrelated, and they were all triplet-born because he wanted this wool-less breed to be hardy. He wanted them to be prolific. So that was where the triplets came from. He was into dogs.
Tom Hodgman: 07:02
He was into herding dogs. He wanted them to flock well, but he also wanted them to be a meat breed. So you could focus on meat without having the drags of wool. So he wanted more of a single-trait focus on meat production rather than this dual-purpose idea. So
Glenda Pereira: 07:23
And those sheep were from the Virgin Islands.
Tom Hodgman: 07:29
Yeah.
Glenda Pereira: 07:29
So when he contacted that photo, they were really sheep. They weren’t goats.
Tom Hodgman: 07:35
They were really sheep. Yeah. They were not goats. He noticed that the tails were long, and a goat has a little short upright tail. And if you look at the image, there’s no little upright tails
Tom Hodgman: 07:46
anywhere.
Glenda Pereira: 07:46
And in that image too, those goats seemed way too together. I know goats herd, but
Tom Hodgman: 07:52
They’re also not skinny. Those sheep in the picture are not
Glenda Pereira: 07:54
And they just look too… in like a circle. I don’t know. Goats never really look like that to me. They’re always, you know, they do their own browsing. Kind of do their own thing. They don’t really-
Tom Hodgman: 08:07
They’re wired differently.
Glenda Pereira: 08:08
Yeah, they are.
Tom Hodgman: 08:09
Yep. Katahdins are, I often say that Katahdins are the transition between sheep and goats because they behave a lot like goats do. They look a lot like a goat, but at the end of the day, they are still a sheep.
Glenda Pereira: 08:21
Yeah. And I think I would say goats are more independent than sheep, in my opinion. That’s what it… that picture, it looks like those were really more sheep because they weren’t as
Tom Hodgman: 08:31
And they do flock moderately well.
Glenda Pereira: 08:33
Yeah.
Tom Hodgman: 08:33
It’s my understanding. So Piel set off on this twenty-year journey of improving this breed, taking this basically feral breed from St. Croix Island and building this breed that would not require shearing, you know. He basically wanted to feed people and wanted to shun the use of synthetic textiles. So he started crossing them with breeds that we know in Maine: Suffolk, Hampshire, South Down, Tunis. And then he, like the one mistake he made was importing the Wiltshire Horn, which is a shedding wool breed from Europe, from England.
Tom Hodgman: 09:18
And he introduced some undesirable traits like horns. Like, we didn’t need horns in the first place. And we had… So occasionally those pop up, and we’ve seen them a few times. So by the mid 1970s, he had a barn set up with breeding pens with a ram here and his seven ewes, and the next one over with 10 ewes. And he did this year after year after year, and crossing them and back crossing them. And every time you cross a wool to a hair sheep, you get a sort of woolly, cruddy mix.
Tom Hodgman: 09:52
So he had to, like, select for ones with the most shedding ability. By the 1970s, he figured he got it.
Glenda Pereira: 09:59
And he had to do incredible record keeping. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because, yeah. Yeah.
Glenda Pereira: 10:04
It’s really easy to get your animal IDs wrong unless you’re saying, “Hey, these are the ones that I wanna continue.” Absolutely.
Tom Hodgman: 10:11
Yep. In the mid 1970s, he got what he considered a slick meat sheep. And he took 120 ewes that he felt were what he was looking for and said, “This will be the Katahdin breed, Katahdin hair sheep.” Really sadly, he dies in 1976, and his wife and the farm manager carry on the vision. So it was like a sudden death sort of thing.
Glenda Pereira: 10:42
And Katahdin being because they were so close to the Katahdin.
Tom Hodgman: 10:47
Yes. He named them Katahdin after Mount Katahdin in Northern Maine, the highest mountain, highest peak in Maine, which is close to the farm because he’s in Abbot, just, you know, I don’t know.
Glenda Pereira: 10:57
Yep. And on the Appalachian Trail.
Tom Hodgman: 11:00
Yes.
Glenda Pereira: 11:01
Colt says it’s Appalachia. He’s wrong.
Colt Knight: 11:03
Right. I mean, I wasn’t born there or anything.
Tom Hodgman: 11:08
So there was quite a discussion for many years. My understanding is that this breed, I mean, I’ve heard tons of stories in Maine about the Piel Farm and what Michael Piel did and how people thought it was odd. But he was a shepherd anyway. He had a 900-acre farm. He had a thousand head of sheep and cattle. His idea was, “Let’s take this hair sheep breed, and we’ll run them down power lines and we’ll clear them of brush and grass and everything to keep them open so we don’t have to use herbicides.”
Tom Hodgman: 11:45
I mean, this guy’s, like, thinking way ahead of his time. There was a bit of a… really, the Piel family didn’t really want to go through with incorporating a breed organization because my understanding was Michael felt that breed organizations have ruined many breeds. And I don’t know if that’s true or not. But anyway, that was… or not that’s the case, they did actually incorporate Katahdin Hair Sheep International, the breed organization’s name, in 1985. It had membership, had a registry. I just learned last week that somebody I bought a lamb from when my daughter… my daughter’s second lamb ever, bought from member number two. Like, the second person ever to sign up was the person I bought from.
Tom Hodgman: 12:45
They began hair coat inspections for them because his big thing was no wool. Like, that was the most important thing. Their actual membership began sometime around 1987 with 23 founding flocks. And like I said, number two was a friend of mine. So today, Katahdins are extremely popular, and it has a lot to do with this no-shearing thing.
Tom Hodgman: 13:15
So it took a long time. I just remember they had a stigma about them because they had hair, but they were also, many of them were very unimproved. They were very thin, and we had very thin sheep for a while too. And it just takes a while to get that animal improved. But they’re strongly maternal.
Tom Hodgman: 13:37
So they’re easy lambers, they’re good mothers, they’re really vigorous lambs. They’re able to breed out of season, so you can have lambs born and diversify your marketing. They’re moderately prolific, so you can get a 200% lamb crop or above. What’s the national average? Like 156 or 160?
Tom Hodgman: 13:56
Might not even be that high. Yep. It’s terribly low. Yep. Terribly low.
Tom Hodgman: 14:00
They’re also found to be worm resistant, not as high as some other breeds, but they’re quite high. They really work well in a terminal cross because this is a… in sheep, you have ewe breeds and ram breeds, and this is a ewe breed. So these are the good mothers. So you want your barn filled with Katahdin ewes, and then you bring in whatever terminal sire you wanna use on them. So all these things together really makes them adaptable for homesteaders, commercial people, people who wanna breed in confinement because the land around them is in grain production, but you have some supplemental grains. They work well in confinement as a ewe breed.
Tom Hodgman: 14:39
They’re extremely important in some of the modern intensive grazing programs we have here today, especially in, like, solar grazing.
Glenda Pereira: 14:48
And this, so I’m curious, has anyone looked into how similar… like, what’s the most similar breed? Because from, like I mentioned, I just learned about… I learned about the breed when I came here to Maine, but your adaptability words stuck with me because if I think about the environment they were placed in, they really were a mutt when they were in, like, the Saint Croix Island, right?
Tom Hodgman: 15:16
Mm-hmm.
Glenda Pereira: 15:16
It was potentially they brought over the sheep from Africa, but then maybe it wasn’t that the ram was maybe that African hair sheep. It was a different breed. And those, you know, there was no artificial insemination. And today, still within the sheep industry, right, it’s not like everybody uses artificial insemination. But so those animals really were crossbreds.
Glenda Pereira: 15:42
And that’s why you’ve seen this adaptable breed. And the biggest advantage that you get from crossbreeding is breed complementarity. So you have two breeds that have potentially really awesome characteristics. You breed them and then the offspring tends to inherit that. Obviously, the better heritability there is from the two breeds, the more likely you’re going to transmit that.
Glenda Pereira: 16:04
But the second part is hybrid vigor, or heterosis, as we call it, which is basically saying that whatever the parent average for that trait is, that offspring is gonna meet in the middle and always improve. It doesn’t always have to be above the parent average, but it’s gonna take those two parents. And the reason why that’s really critical is because you’re always limited to what you can do within your breed. So then when you cross a breed, you get a better improvement. So it’s always adding to whatever the parent average is.
Glenda Pereira: 16:39
And that’s really where I foresee this breed. And you can let me know if that’s true or not, but that adaptability word is what we tend to associate with a lot of crossbred animals.
Tom Hodgman: 16:51
There are a couple of points there. There is discussion that I’ve heard people use this term, retained heterosis. So I don’t know if that’s actually a thing, but that hybrid vigor is actually somewhat stabilized in this breed, which makes… and I’ll tell you that these lambs are super vigorous. Anybody who’s lambed wool sheep, and then lambs like a toddler, they go, “Whoa, I’ve never seen anything like that before.” And it’s almost creepy that they can’t walk yet, and they’re finding the teat and latching on while the mother’s laying down, spitting out the second one or the third one.
Tom Hodgman: 17:29
And the lamb’s in the way because you’re trying to help the mother, and… or the lamb is right there. So that is definitely one case. The closest breed is the St. Croix breed. And that is basically the same parent breed, but they’re smaller and they’re less meaty because Piel was looking for a way to improve meat production in a wool-less breed.
Tom Hodgman: 17:57
So that’s where that comes from. So yeah.
Glenda Pereira: 18:01
Yeah, interesting.
Tom Hodgman: 18:02
Yeah. So if you flash forward to today, this breed is extremely popular. There’s, like, pushing 200,000 registered Katahdins in the US.
Colt Knight: 18:14
Are they still the fastest-growing breed registry in the sheep?
Tom Hodgman: 18:17
They are. Yeah, I believe so. They flip back and forth with Dorpers, is another hair sheep. And I believe so. There’s a number of hair breeds now in the US for various reasons.
Tom Hodgman: 18:31
St. Croix, so it’d be Katahdin and Dorper, sort of neck and neck for the most popular. In the Northeast, Katahdins… anywhere where there’s worms, you tend to get more Katahdin interest. So the Southeast, the Midwest, the Northeast. And if you get into a drier area, like in Texas, and that’s where you get a lot more Dorper or Ouessant.
Tom Hodgman: 18:53
There’s like over 1,500 members of the organization now, you know, started with 23 back in ’85. Yeah, and it’s bizarre that they’re super popular in Mexico and Puerto Rico. Like they have some hair sheep breeds in Mexico, like the Pelibuey, which is a little, looks like a little tan Katahdin. But this is like… so you get, like, a giant Pelibuey, we like one of our brown ones in the barn here. So I think that’s kind of cool.
Tom Hodgman: 19:24
There’s been lots of exports to South and Central America, to Southeast Asia even. And there’s some genetics in the UK. So the Exlana breed, or it’s not even a breed, it’s like the Exlana Movement Association Organization. It’s a composite thing. They’re always, like, getting genetics wherever they want.
Tom Hodgman: 19:42
They’re like… I’ve talked to some of them this year about getting some Katahdin genetics over there. But if you just take social media, for example, just like a year or so ago, I did a count and I came up with, there were 33 Facebook groups just focused on Katahdin sheep. 33. And several of those have over 5,000 followers, and one has 11,000 followers. I told that to one of the Piel family not too long ago, and they were blown away.
Tom Hodgman: 20:11
Yeah. Just blown away that their uncle had created this thing that was so popular. I will say that it’s also become what I would refer to as the research breed because there are… until just very recently, it was the only sheep breed in the United States at all three USDA sheep research stations. So that in itself… so in Idaho, so in Arkansas, and then in Nebraska, and then now in Idaho… and now the Arkansas flock has moved to Nebraska. But there’s been a ton of work on worm resistance, just a lot of people doing that sort of stuff and publishing papers on that.
Tom Hodgman: 20:58
So there’s a lot of information there. We know the heritability of it much better now than we once did. Multiple institutions are working on that. The National Sheep Improvement Program, which is another whole topic, is something that I’ve been heavily involved with for about nineteen years, and that has a lot of Katahdins in it. And they’re doing sort of on-farm data collection to improve their flock and ultimately the breed in many cases.
Tom Hodgman: 21:29
So in that case, there’s about probably just over 100 active flocks in the National Sheep Improvement Program, Katahdin flocks. That’s the most members in a breed in an NSIP, but it’s not the most sheep because there are Rambouillet flocks and Targhee flocks that are huge that are enrolled, but there’s only maybe 10 or 15 members. So we have a lot of breeders, but they have smaller flocks. That’s the nature of the Katahdin breed, is to have… there’s Katahdins everywhere. Like, every town in Maine, I bet has some Katahdins somewhere.
Tom Hodgman: 22:12
And it’s just, you’re driving down the road, all of a sudden you see these multicolored flocks in the backyard with long tails. I’m like, those are Katahdins. And I’ve done that driving through Missouri on the interstate. It’s like, oh, there’s a group of 75 right there. So wherever we go, we tend to see them.
Tom Hodgman: 22:27
Yeah. The other big thing is that Katahdin went genomic a few years ago. We built a genomic reference population of about… about 3,000 individuals several years ago, and now that reference population is approaching about 10,000. In NSIP, we’re collecting phenotypic data on about eight to 9,000 lambs per year, and we have well over 100,000 individuals in that database. So we’ve got a huge amount of data behind us.
Tom Hodgman: 23:12
We’re doing a lot of genotyping now, flock-wide. Many flocks are involved with this. We’ve got a relatively reasonable fee to accommodate that. So we’re able to capitalize on a genomic pedigree. So it’s not just based on whoever said the parents were, we’re knowing exactly who they were. And we have a whole series of these super cool genetic conditions, like resistance to disease and muscling and fecundity and all these other things that we can breed for or against, depending on what your philosophies are.
Tom Hodgman: 23:48
So we’re really thrilled with all that. There’s some future work not too far off where we’re talking about really reducing the susceptibility to OPP, ovine progressive pneumonia. That’s sort of on our radar here right now, where we’re trying to really focus on getting those types of animals into our flock and identifying who has the most resistance and breeding those animals forward. So that’s… right.
Glenda Pereira: 24:23
Because especially, like, for a day like today… you know, earlier this week, it was what? 20 or less overnight?
Colt Knight: 24:33
It was single digits, yeah, last weekend.
Glenda Pereira: 24:35
Absolutely. And then today, it’s fifty, fifty-two, or close to that.
Colt Knight: 24:40
So huge temperature swing is
Glenda Pereira: 24:42
fluctuation this week has been awful for all of our livestock species. So
Tom Hodgman: 24:47
OPP is a pneumonia that is, it’s a viral pneumonia and it’s a slow-growing one. It’s similar to HIV/AIDS, I guess, except that in this case, it’s spread by aerosolized droplets, like COVID was spread. So if you think about how we raise sheep in Maine, where do they go in the winter? Like ours are in a barn. And if you’re coughing on somebody next to you, then you’re highly vulnerable to the spread of that.
Tom Hodgman: 25:16
This is something that we want to really get ahead on.
Glenda Pereira: 25:23
Even just the susceptibility. So like I was mentioning this week, all these animals are just gonna be on a roller-coaster swing. So their susceptibility to be compromised, to potentially develop diseases otherwise if they were healthy, it just increases much more with cold, hot, cold, hot, back and forth.
Tom Hodgman: 25:42
Exactly. That stresses the immune system. And I guess there’s data to show that with different immunoglobulins, so different IgG, I guess, is one of them that has been studied at length in the Katahdin breed and found that sheep that are generally worm resistant have fewer other things wrong with them. So there’s like some carryover effect. So there’s just a ton of work there.
Tom Hodgman: 26:12
And like I said at the beginning, it was a breed whose time has come, but that there was this funny observation in a magazine one night, and this guy had this vision, and he pulled it off. And now this is like… this is the breed in the US that’s really, really taking off. It’s like Colt said, you know, it’s still the one that’s leading in growth, and it’s right there with another hair breed. And now we’re seeing, you know, solar… people grazing solar, and they’re looking for easy-working sheep in units of hundreds to be able to pull this off all across the US. And now some of the largest flocks of Katahdins in the country are one in Texas with 10,000 ewes and another in Georgia heading to 15,000 ewes.
Tom Hodgman: 27:06
Those are seriously large Katahdin flocks. Right. I can’t even imagine what that’s like. And some of these, like what they’re doing in Georgia, they’re building the solar structure and the sheep structure together to support the whole thing. Right.
Tom Hodgman: 27:25
So it’s like, it’s one. Yeah. It’s one, it feeds back on itself. So you don’t have to haul them there, they live there. Yep.
Tom Hodgman: 27:34
The barns, barn is there, structures are there. So anyway, it really is a breed whose time has come, and I’m thrilled to have been part of it.
Glenda Pereira: 27:44
Yeah, and it continues to evolve. So I think that’s the biggest thing. If we’ve learned anything from genetic improvement, it’s always gonna evolve and adapt to new trends, maybe consumer demand, environment, and these sheep really seem to have been able to do that. Right? They continue to adapt and evolve because, I mean, their origin was West Africa.
Glenda Pereira: 28:09
And then they went to this really warm place, the Virgin Islands. And now they’re here in Maine where most of the winter is spent below 20 degrees.
Tom Hodgman: 28:18
There’s stories about that. I think the mortality of many of those early animals was quite high. So there’s been a significant natural selection simply for hardiness. And that’s
Colt Knight: 28:32
why you don’t see the Dorpers up this far. They do not like cold weather.
Tom Hodgman: 28:37
And feet, so they have a softer foot. Yeah, way softer. White hooves. And white hooves on wet ground is tough, and half of Maine is wet. Yep.
Tom Hodgman: 28:47
So… so worm resistance in our desert sheep, so worm resistance and a soft hoof. So they’re built for… I mean, they have that woolly rug on their back, so they… to shade their body, to keep them cooler. And so… Katahdins are a breed developed in Maine, but they’re actually more popular in the Southeast and the Midwest than they are anywhere else. Although there are tons of Katahdins in Maine, I just would say there are not a lot of improved Katahdins in Maine.
Colt Knight: 29:16
Well, to other states, we don’t have a large sheep population in general or livestock in general. No. It’s not a large population.
Tom Hodgman: 29:22
It’s typical for New England, though, where everybody has a small flock and there’s a lot of folks spinning and things like that. So someone might have five or six sheep, and that’s… and that happens all over. And that’s very common throughout New England. But we are in
Colt Knight: 29:37
a new time now.
Tom Hodgman: 29:38
Who would have thought even just six or seven years ago that solar grazing would be taking off like it is, and that Katahdins… I forget the numbers, but there are something like 60% of the sheep on solar are hair sheep, and most of those are Katahdins. Like 80% of those are Katahdins or Katahdin crosses. And a lot
Colt Knight: 30:00
of them
Tom Hodgman: 30:00
are Katahdin-Dorper crosses because that’s a common cross. Anyhow, so that’s, yeah. So that’s sort of full circle.
Glenda Pereira: 30:08
Incredible. Tom,
Colt Knight: 30:09
we appreciate you sitting there.
Tom Hodgman: 30:12
My pleasure. I love talking… I love talking Katahdin history. I get pretty excited about it. So
Glenda Pereira: 30:17
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 30:18
And I like sheep. I did a lot of sheep and goat work in graduate school, and I don’t get to work with sheep and goats very often. Most folks just have a handful. So it’s not a lot of production work that I get to help with with the
Tom Hodgman: 30:32
Yeah, we’d like to see more production-oriented flocks, and we’re working on revitalizing the Maine Sheep Breeders Association for that. One of those reasons is just that, to get a more vibrant sheep industry going in the state of Maine. I mean, it’s a cheaper way… young people without a lot of resources can get started in sheep without a lot of infrastructure. Yeah. Sheep can tolerate being outside, and they don’t require steel panels and steel gates.
Tom Hodgman: 31:09
You can do a lot of stuff with inexpensive materials, and they’re easy to haul, they’re easy to handle. There’s a lot of women involved with sheep management. I would say half the people that I interact with in Katahdin world are women, as opposed to with cattle, it would be mostly male dominated. But the size of the animal has a lot to do with it.
Colt Knight: 31:30
And they’re ready to eat in under a year.
Tom Hodgman: 31:33
They are. And you can eat two of them. Yep. You can eat two of them in less than a year. Yep.
Tom Hodgman: 31:39
So genetic improvement is faster. It isn’t chickens, but it’s pretty fast. So we can make rapid genetic progress with sheep. So look out, Holstein world, here we come.
Glenda Pereira: 31:51
Well, it has been a great conversation. Thank you again, Tom, for sitting with us. Really appreciate it. Again, we’ll leave in the show notes all of the information you shared for folks to follow up with Tom if they wanna continue the conversation about Katahdins. And for our listeners who have questions, comments, or future topic suggestions, be sure to email us at extension.farmcast@maine.edu. Colt, you were so quiet.
Glenda Pereira: 32:18
He’s been so quiet on these two episodes. I’m kind of scared.
Colt Knight: 32:22
I was sick earlier this week.
Glenda Pereira: 32:24
So I
Colt Knight: 32:25
don’t have
Glenda Pereira: 32:25
told me.
Colt Knight: 32:25
I don’t wanna start hacking and coughing on the
Glenda Pereira: 32:28
Yeah. Colt’s quiet. This is not normal.
Tom Hodgman: 32:31
It’s okay. I get on a roll, and I just…
Colt Knight: 32:36
Well, it’s funny because a lot of folks think that I’m super gregarious and talkative. I’m normally really shy and don’t speak much at all, but I talk for a living, so that’s kind of weird. But it’s usually just one hour for my morning class, or if I go do a farm visit, and we do these podcasts when people come to visit me and I have to talk all day long. I usually go hoarse after the first day, and then I… because I’m not used to speaking a whole lot. And I think that’s back when I was a kid, I might have had rubber bands that, like, wired my mouth shut when I had braces. And so I just didn’t open my mouth much.
Colt Knight: 33:12
Because if you wanted to talk, you had to reach in your mouth in front of people and remove these four rubber bands, and nobody wants to do that.
Tom Hodgman: 33:22
Yeah. It’s… I just, I just get on a roll. I get on a roll, which I’m given.