Extension agent doesn’t just talk the talk
Staff writer
Rickey Roberts is best known for his work as an extension agent with Chisholm Trail Extension District, but he has another life beyond educating people about farming practices.
He speaks from experience.
“I’ve been raising sheep my whole life,” Roberts said. “My folks raised me in a barn.”
Growing up at Crescent, Oklahoma, he took a special interest in sheep.
The years Roberts attended college were the only time he wasn’t raising sheep. His older brother didn’t hear the same call.
When Roberts and his wife, Sonya, came to Marion County in 2001, they spent a year living at Peabody.
Then they bought a farm in 2002 and built a four-bedroom home where they raised three children and sheep.
Roberts’ black-faced sheep are his breeding stock.
Breeding ewes are put on a hormone program to enhance ovulation. They will produce many eggs in a cycle, sometimes more than 20.
Host ewes also are treated with hormones so both donors and recipients run the same reproductive cycle. That way, they are ready when it’s time to host embryos.
The breeding ewes then are artificially inseminated.
It’s a highly regulated program. Timing of insemination and transplant are critical.
So is timing of flushing fertilized eggs out of the pregnant donor ewes six days after fertilization and transplanting the embryos to host ewes.
Timing is scheduled to a precise hour. If the process is to be done at 6 a.m., it can’t be set back to 10 a.m.
Even though fertilized donor ewes have embryos flushed out, sometimes one will carry a pregnancy and produce a lamb of her own.
The breeding process can be done three times a year, Roberts said.
Roberts’ younger son, a university senior planning a career in feed production, also has an interest in raising sheep.
It’s possible his son eventually will take over the family sheep business along with working in feed milling.