Sheep showing family finds success in the ring

SHAWANO — The lambs are gone, the stall walls folded up. The barn is clean, equipment stacked in preparation for next year’s campaign of showing market lambs at the Roloff family’s Rockin’ R Ranch north of Shawano.

Prominent mong the ribbons and awards neatly displayed on the walls is the Reserve Champion honor won by Lindsey Roloff with her crossbred lamb at the American Royal Association livestock show Oct. 19 in Kansas City, Missouri. She was the only contender from the Midwest to win with the other champions coming from Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio, Colorado and California.

Roloff, 18, said she’s definitely looking forward to her 10th year of showing lambs and building on this year’s successes. “I feel like it’s been fun with my family. It’s always a new day,” Roloff, a Shawano Community High School graduate and current St. Norbert College student, said. “It’s always a new judge and finding out what he thinks is important. There’s a lot of motivation to see what’s going to happen.”

For 2019, Lindsey admitted she had really high hopes and expectations when she selected her lamb. He was very well put together, she said. The lamb had many of the characteristics that win in the show ring, such as a “big top, a big leg and tall-fronted,” she said. “I didn’t realize at first just how good he was,” she added. “It was eye-opening.”

Successful showing “evolves from making them comfortable with you and knowing the lamb and knowing what makes them look best,” Lindsey said. Even though they work together frequently, each sister has her own style in the show ring. Isabel, Lindsey’s younger sister, said they couldn’t switch lambs, for instance, and still be successful.

According to Lindsey, winning in the show ring is “90% the lamb and 10% me.” Her father Jeff disagreed, asserting the importance of good showmanship. The Roloff sisters have also won showmanship recognition.

Crossbreds are shown most frequently, Lindsey explained, although they can also be classified and shown with purebreds, such as Hampshires and Suffolks. At the Wisconsin State Fair, for example, it’s at the discretion of show officials on how a lamb is classified, she said.

Lindsey and Isabel found the right equation this year, sweeping the top two places at more than one competition.

Lindsey showed the Grand Champion and Isabel had Reserve Champion at a show at Western Illinois University. “It was very exciting to know we were that competitive,” Lindsey said.

“It’s impressive to think about where we are now,” Lindsey added. “Everywhere we went, we seemed to win something,” she observed about their showing this year.

Her attraction to lambs started when she was a young girl and her father took her to the Shawano County Fair. Lindsey recalled how soft they are, telling her dad they “felt like a carpet.” When she was 9 years old, she was eligible to participate in 4-H, Jeff Roloff said, and she chose a lamb to show that year.

Her excitement and enthusiasm grew after that first year, thanks in part to the help and encouragement from other farm families in the area, as well as breeders around the state and region, Jeff Roloff said. As a family that didn’t live on a farm and didn’t have any farming or livestock background, he called his family’s lamb showing experience a 4-H success story.

Isabel agreed, saying, “4-H gave us the building blocks.”

Over the next few years, the Roloffs said they pursued better genetics to be more competitive in the show ring. “We were getting there but just not quite winning,” Lindsey said. They began attending shows around the state and continued to pursue better animals. By the time she reached age 12 and could show at the Wisconsin State Fair, the entire family was involved including eldest sister Lauren and mother, Jenny Roloff. They also acquired their Rockin’ R facility.

The family kept its own flock of ewes for breeding show candidates for several years. Last fall, however, with Lindsey off to college in DePere and Lauren attending the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the Roloffs sold those sheep.