When Scottie Jones was working at the Phoenix Zoo, she never imagined moving to Alsea, Oregon — much less becoming a farmer.
Scottie worked on the business and retail side of the zoo, while her husband, Greg Jones, worked as a psychologist.
The two had dreamt about moving out of Arizona for years, but they hadn’t expected to make the journey to the Pacific Northwest.
Their friends and family certainly couldn’t believe it when they actually did it at 50 years old.
“Our children thought we'd lost our minds,” Scottie laughed. “They were really mad at us for moving here.”
After visiting the Leaping Lamb Farm in 2003, Scottie fell in love with the weather, the idea of growing her own food and the barn.
So, she bought it. The Joneses purchased the farm and the various animals on it, packed their bags, grabbed their two dogs and two horses and made the drive up.
Twenty-three years later, Scottie has made a place for herself in the sheep farming community. And she’s learned — often the hard way — how to make a living off her land and why it’s all worth it.
A reality check
Scottie said it didn’t take long to realize she had been “romantically deluded.” The farm demanded her time and energy incessantly, and problems popped up everywhere.
“We didn't know what we were getting into; we really didn't,” she said. “Everything fell apart. Everything was dramatic. Everything was tragic.”
In the first few years, Scottie said it felt like anything that could go wrong did.
One of the first troubling incidents involved their dogs, who were used to city life in Arizona. Now free to roam and cause chaos, and with easy targets, the dogs had teamed up to lead one of Scottie’s ewes into the creek by the fields.
“One of them's got her holding by the ear. The other one is egging him on,” Scottie recalled. They had to drag the ewe out of the deep end.
“I don't know how my daughter and I did it,” she said.
Worried for the ewe’s health, Scottie called her new neighbor down the road to ask for a veterinarian.
“She goes, ‘That vet's going to cost you $150. You need to figure it out yourself,’” Scottie remembered. “So, that was our very first reality check.”
As other problems cropped up, Scottie and Greg have taken on projects requiring a variety of skills.
When their horses figured out how to open the gate locks and got out, Scottie designed and engineered a new kind of lock. When raccoons killed their chickens, Greg took on the role of carpenter, building better walls for their coop.
Scottie kept her neighbors on speed dial for when things inevitably went wrong.
At times, she wanted to give up — until she found out that’s exactly what people expected her to do.
“Our friends back home were betting that we weren't going to stay, and we also found out that people here were wondering how long we were going to stay,” Scottie said. “When I find out that people are betting against me, I dig my heels in.”
Learning the basics
Determined to prove her friends and neighbors wrong, Scottie enrolled in farming classes with the Oregon State University Extension Service, an educational outreach program with workshops focused on agriculture and community health.
That’s where Scottie met Melissa Fery, a professor and small farm educator with OSU Extension. Fery remembered Scottie as someone open to learning, eager to soak up new information and connect with other landowners.
“I felt she wanted to be able to succeed in their new farm life, and she needed help to do that,” Fery recalled.
Fery said new farmers have a lot to learn when it comes to water, soil and septic systems. Sheep farmers have to become experts in rotational grazing and lambing. But one thing that set Scottie apart from her fellow students was that she was already an expert in business, thanks to her background at the zoo.
“At one point, (the Jones’) were raising turkeys, and she had developed this Excel spreadsheet that tracked expenses and income,” Fery remembered. “I asked her to come and share that at one of the … classes related to this growing farm series, and she came.
“Farmers love to learn from other farmers,” she said.
Scottie’s spreadsheet helped her fellow farmers learn how to track their profits and losses, something Fery said both beginning and established farmers struggle with. And Scottie invited other female farmers to Leaping Lamb to hear her story and learn from her mistakes.
Still, with several multi-generational farms and logging families in the area, Scottie said she’s still seen as the lamb of the neighborhood.
‘I don’t regret it at all’
Now called the Leaping Lamb Farm & Farm Stay, the farm sells meat from about 15 to 20 lambs a year directly to customers and visitors. But Scottie’s primary source of income comes from the farmstay she started in 2006.
Fery said Scottie’s incorporation of agricultural tourism into her farm has helped her have success that other farmers might not.
“Sometimes people decide to move on from farming. It’s not for them, or they can’t figure out a way to make it profitable,” Fery said. “And then there’s people like Scottie (who) are tenacious, and they’re going to figure it out.”
The farmstay includes a 6-bedroom farmhouse built in 1895 and a 2-bedroom cottage. Visitors learn how to help on the farm and can enjoy fresh eggs and fruit from the land.
Scottie said she’s learned valuable life lessons from her experiences with guests.
“I'll watch people trying to help get the chickens into the chicken coop, or try to help me with the sheep, and they're too fast — kids and adults — and I just go, ‘Slow down,’” Scottie said. “So, when you talk about ‘what else have we gotten here,’ it's about learning how to slow down.”
Her guests come from all over the country looking for respite. Scottie says she notices them connecting with nature — and each other — in a more intentional way at the farmstay. At dinner, phones are put away. Children play with the animals while their parents walk through the grassy fields.
It’s helped Scottie connect more intentionally with the land and animals, too.
The lambs sold for meat complete their full life cycle at Leaping Lamb, and Scottie tries to give them the best life possible before they’re butchered and shipped away.
“I just say, they have a great life and one very bad day. And it's usually a pretty somber day on the farm,” Scottie said.
Those days were especially hard for Scottie early on. She tried to stay away from the barn and the butcher. In Arizona, she wasn’t accustomed to thinking so much about death or life.
But now, she said she appreciates both more than ever.
“What I think farming is about is it gets you really close to life and death,” she said. “It's so cyclical. It's plants living and dying; it's animals living and dying. It's just the whole landscape changing. I think I was very disconnected before I moved here.”
Understanding this cycle has helped Scottie improve the conditions of her farm and her own mentality. Now, she knows the end of one lamb’s life allows her to sustain others on the farm.
In a similar way, the end of her life as she knew it in Arizona allowed her to create something new and unexpected at Leaping Lamb.
“People have said, ‘Do you regret that you did this?’” Scottie said. “ And, no, I absolutely don't regret it, not at all.”
