Amherst Island sheep farm works to maintain wild spaces

On Amherst Island on a recent windy Tuesday morning, Jacob Murray is busy at work behind one of the Topsy Farms tractors, attaching a round bale roller device that looks handmade.

According to a grinning Murray, it unrolls the large hay bales like “giant rolls of toilet paper,” providing winter feed for the sheep farm’s approximately 590 breeding ewes and its handful of rams.

There’s always something to fix, to prepare, to repair, to do on the 400-acre island property — those jobs require innovation, elbow grease, skill-building or, at last resort, money.

“Sometimes it’s ingenuity and sometimes it’s money, and in this world and especially in this economy, in this last year and a half of inflation, whatever might have been there extra before, nobody has extra anymore,” Murray said.

Topsy Farms began as a communal project when a handful of friends purchased the property on the northwest corner of Amherst Island in 1971. In the late ‘70s, the farm found its focus and turned its resources and efforts to farming sheep, building a flock of 1,100 breeding ewes by 2017.