Sheep Shearing Industry Draws Interest from Diverse Manitobans

Sheep shearing is the family business for many people in the trade, but demonstration shearer Chloe Bermejo came to it much later. While she knew she wanted to work with animals from a young age, Bermejo is neither from a farm family nor even a region where sheep are prevalent.

Bermejo’s family emigrated to Canada in 2011 from the Philippines via Dubai and settled in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. Bermejo now calls Plumas home, just a short drive north of Neepawa. It was her partner Russell and his family who introduced her to the trade of sheep shearing, which has now been her profession for two years. In that short period of time, she’s now performing sheep shearing demonstrations for hundreds of people at one of Manitoba’s largest agricultural fairs.

Bermejo says she particularly enjoys doing demonstrations for kids, who are eager to learn about the animals and the job.There are a lot of sheep in the Westman area and not a lot of shearers, which is why it has become so important for people like Bermejo to come into the trade from all backgrounds. Demonstrations like the one at the winter fair help introduce people to the profession, one which actually gamifies its task and holds shearing competitions all over the world, and as well they are beginning to hold shearing schools to train new shearers who might not have come from sheep farms themselves.

Wool is big business, not only for the textile industry but for other industries as well, including new uses as fertilizer. As Bermejo says, we can be doing so much more with wool than we currently are. The family’s own farm has about 450 head right now, and they are hoping to increase that to 1,000. That means more work for shearers, and even though Bermejo has set her goals to increase from 80 to 100 sheep in a day to 150, that still leaves a huge gap for more people to be encouraged into the trade.