03-05-2025
Ram on the lam: A beginning farmer tale
A Dorper ram in the foreground with a Romanov ewe. (Photo by Kreg Leymaster/Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture)
It's December 20th. And this story took place when my husband and I lived in town, but wanted to experiment with farming. So, we partnered with Joe and Lonna, a farming couple that lived just outside of Ames, Iowa at Onion Creek Farm. We decided to go all in and raise a handful of sheep together.
You know, Joe and Lonna have a history of putting up with crazy young people who want to experiment with different farming ideas. So, we thought, let's do this.
And we decided to rent a ram, like we had done a couple winters in the past. We didn't keep a ram year-round to breed our ladies. We just wanted to rent one for a few weeks every December, so we'd end up with lambs the next spring.
Joe is the DIY type of dude. He built his house with his own two hands. Joe and Lonna are vegetable farmers by trade, but they were really into the idea of letting livestock graze their veggie fields at certain times of the year to get that fertility, build up the soil, et cetera. It was a great partnership. It had gone smoothly for several years.
Well, this year, Joe and I took a livestock trailer, hauled it down to another farmer's place to pick up this ram that we were renting. And, you know, hauling a livestock trailer is a whole feat in itself. And, honestly, the day had gone super smoothly. We were really proud of ourselves.
We dropped off some sheep at another farm on the way, and here we are picking up this ram to take back to Joe and Lana's farm. Great, wonderful. It all went super smoothly.
By the time we got back, it was almost dark. And we backed the trailer up into the fenced-in pasture. The ladies are there waiting for their fellow. And we're just so, so happy the day has gone really well.
We get out of the truck. As we open the back door to the trailer, this ram — whom I'm convinced has springs built into its hoofs — this ram soars over the fence that we have set up, disregarding the females waiting there to be bred.
No, it doesn't matter. This ram soars over this fence like a reindeer pulling Santa's sleigh.
It's dusk. And luckily, the ram was white because we could see the white speck running into the woods, just getting further and further away from us. So, of course, I take a bucket of grain, but then again, these are grass-fed animals. They've never been trained to pellets or grain of any sort, but I do what I can.
I take a bucket of grain into the woods. I try to call this animal. I'm running through the woods at night. There's no way. I cannot find this animal at all, so I decide I'll be back first thing in the morning, crack of dawn.
And let's hope that the ram is just standing at the fence line, smells the ladies ready to get back in, or better yet, has already jumped back in with the ladies. That'll probably happen. I'll come back in the morning.
After a sleepless night I show up, crack of dawn. There's no ram in the pasture. There is no ram to be seen. This is when we realize, okay, this is going to be a little bit more serious of a situation than your average.
Like I said, this is right before Christmas. For the next six days, we are just on edge with trying to track this ram down. We do everything someone does when an animal escapes.
You call all the neighbors. You call the animal control of the county we were in and the next county over. We don't know how far this thing's going to get. We check Ames Facebook group incessantly to see if anyone's had a ram sighting.
You know, we call our friends. We're going to call the sheriff. We've got to report this animal so we can get this thing back. We spend our days searching through cornfields and forests around the farm, looking for this animal to see if we can find any sort of clues.
And then by the time night falls, we decide, all right, we can't really look much more.
Let's retire for the night, see what happens tomorrow. Maybe we'll get a call.
A couple days before Christmas, we get invited to go over to sing Christmas carols in front of a fireplace at a friend's house. And we thought, you know what, let's get our minds off of this. This will be really nice to just go sing some Christmas songs.
So we get there. We're drinking hot cocoa. We're doing the things. We're trying to forget about the circumstance. And we're singing these songs and I realized that there's like multiple Christmas carols that have the lyrics, shepherds watching o'er their flocks.
And I am like, okay, this isn't helping and I need to leave. This is not fun for me anymore. So that didn't work out.
We also realized family Christmas is canceled. Like we can't get out town now. We have to stay. Can't visit the family because we got this ram on the loose, and we don't even own the ram, right? If we owned it, different story, I wouldn't care as much, but we're borrowing the ram.
Okay, so then we get a call. We get a call on December 23rd, a couple days before Christmas, that the ram has been spotted on a golf course north of town. Hallelujah, we drive straight to the golf course. Wonderful.
And it's great that this ram's on the golf course. There's still some grass to graze.
All the ponds are aerated, so the ram has water to drink. And I'm like, you know, it could live its whole life there, I guess.
We're going to figure out how to get it. And so, of course, what do we do?
We call our friends. We get people to help us. We go get our mobile netting, like all of our rolls of net fencing. We're just going to fence this ram and get it into the trailer and that'll be it.
All right. We start to execute this plan and we realize that this ram has like the largest flight zone of any livestock I've ever worked with in my life. Usually a flight zone should be, oh, let's say, 10 to 20 feet. This thing's like 300 feet. And it is so skittish.
And there's no way. There's no way with a wall of human people. Are we going to get this ram? There's no way with putting fencing around this animal.
The golfers on the golf course, on the other hand, they all think this is hilarious. They're like, this is a new challenge for us. This is hilarious. We get to golf with the sheep and they're laughing and they're like, oh, are you the owners of the sheep?
And you know, I was not feeling the holiday spirit like these people were, but I'm glad it could provide some entertainment.
Then this is really when the spiral and the mad madness begins.
I call the ISU rodeo Club. Iowa State University Rodeo Club.
Of course, they're on Christmas break, okay? No one's there to help lassoing.
Then I we have a friend who says, you know what, my dad grew up on a ranch in Colorado. He is a lasso master.
He dusted off his old trusty lasso and he came out to the field and we're like, okay, this is it, this is it.
He said, 'Let me go by myself. Let me try this.'
He's very calm.
I am not calm at this moment.
So I stay in the parking lot.
He walks out with his lasso and he comes back very quickly after and says, 'There's no way I'm getting close enough to lasso this ram.
Okay, so that's out.
Then I'm making a call to the sheriff, asking the sheriff if he can tranquilize this animal.
Sheriff tells me, sorry, ma'am, but if the ram is not deemed a danger to society, we cannot tranquilize within city limits.
Okay. So then the tranquilizer gun is that the top of my Christmas list? Didn't expect that, okay? And they're expensive. I'm looking into what I need to do to buy this tranquilizer gun.
Okay. So none of that worked.
Here we are Christmas Day. We do our thing in the morning. We celebrate Christmas, still don't have this ram.
We get through the holiday and then the breakthrough happened, December 26th.
We get a call that the ram has now been spotted at the mega church across the street from the golf course.
We get the call and so does Joe, the farmer, who lives closer to the church.
We're both on our way to the church.
Joe, somewhat unfortunately, gets there before us because we had just gone to the airport to pick up a friend who's visiting us. We're getting there as quick as we can.
And the janitor at this church day after Christmas is cleaning up. They had a bunch of people there the night before.
This is a huge church, so there's these massive windows and massive glass doors.
And the janitor hears boom, boom, boom. And he thinks someone's breaking into the church. I got to go see what's going on. But it's like morning time, daylight. He looks out the window and there's a ram ramming its reflection in the window, probably about to bust through this window.
Turns out this holy lamb of God had been across the street at the golf course. Full-sized window there. He'd walked through a glass door there, completely shattered it already.
And this is the true Christmas miracle.
The janitor is also a farmer and somehow he goes outside and manages to hog tie the ram up. This ram is tied with its hoofs with some twine and rope, and it is now ready for pickup.
Joe, the farmer, gets there before we do, like I said, and he loads the ram up in the back of his truck and goes back to the farm.
Okay.
We are driving as fast as we can back from this airport with this friend. It is important to mention who the friend is. The friend is a photographer from LA. Artsy type. He is an Iowa boy, but he doesn't spend much time on farms anymore. So, you know, he's not used to chasing a ram on a farm.
We go directly from the airport to the farm as we're speeding and bumping down the gravel road. We start to see Joe standing there next to a fence, and then we see the ram scaling the fence and starting to fly over it, and escape again.
And this time he's running off towards the same woods with a rope dangling from the back of his hoof, and that's when my husband just throws the car in park, and runs out sprinting.
I've never seen this guy run this fast, sprinting as fast as he can to capture by hand this ram, so he doesn't escape again after he's been on the loose for six days.
And then Rob, the photographer, decides to help, what else can he do? He starts sprinting. And okay, luckily, there was a loose piece of old barbed wire and the ram got caught up in it.
And at that moment, my husband Omar was able to just manhandle the ram, just lay flat his whole body weight on the animal, and then grab the rope and start tying him up again.
And we look back, Rob, the photographer, he's vomiting. He's puking all over the field because he didn't expect this. I'm just standing there like I can't quite see what's happening in the woods with the ram and Omar.
I don't know what to do.
Anyway, Omar emerges from the woods, carrying a ram who is squirming and trying to get away.
I will tell you that the heroes of this story are Omar and the janitor.
I have no idea what happened between the pick up at the mega church and the escape back at the farm. That doesn't matter anymore. These details don't matter. What matters is that we obviously realized that we're not going to use this ram for breeding.
We're not going to spread those genetics on.
Then we put that ram immediately in the back of the truck and we drove it back to its home farm. We returned that ram never to see it again.
And I do just want to say that, you know, it's a true Christmas miracle that we got that ram back in one piece.
We did not have to sacrifice its life during this process.
And I also want to thank Joe and Lonna for allowing us to bring this madness to their farm.
And I want to thank all farmers who are willing to put up with a little bit of madness from young beginning farmers.
This column is republished from Mary Swanders' Buggy Land, through the Iowa Writers' Collaborative.
Editor's note: Please consider subscribing to the collaborative and its member writers to support their work.
