Sun Raised Sheep
Pinestraw magazine, the premier magazine of the Sandhills region of North Carolina featured an article on Sun Raised Foods and the Montgomery Sheep Farm in March 2024
Palomo, a 165 lb Great Pyrenees, Tonje and Joel with 3 month old lamb at the Montgomery Sheep Farm
Farming at the bleating edge
By Jenna Biter
Photographs by John Gessner
Peafowl nap high in the rafters of a classic red barn. One bird, awakened by a buzz buzz buzzing, pecks a housefly out of the air like Mr. Miyagi with chopsticks. And the buzzing stops.
Now, the peacock is presumably less irritated, as well as less hungry, and the fly can’t buzz down to the wobbly-legged lambs, whose developing immune systems are better off without whatever infections the insect might be spreading.
The lambs’ young stomachs aren’t even strong enough to digest what will become their steady diet of grass. When they do grow strong enough, at a couple of months old, they’ll leave the red barn to join the flock munching its way across a quilt of pastures tucked down a gravel drive beside a flea market in Biscoe.
A few westward turns out of Moore County and into Montgomery, the 500-head Katahdin flock grazes beneath the shade of solar panels, where the Old World meets the Ewe, uh, New.
“They use this word ‘agrivoltaics,’” says Joel Olsen, a Charlotte native who owns the Montgomery Sheep Farm, with his wife, Tonje, “which doesn’t mean anything to most people.” That’s something the couple seems on a mission to change.
