Auburn's Holly Gross returns from Royal Winter Fair with Junior Sheep Show gold

BY SCOTT STEPHENSON

At this year's Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Toronto, a Southdown Lamb named Marlee, owned by Auburn's own Holly Gross, was named the Grand Champion Lamb in the Junior Sheep Show. It’s not every day that a Grand Champion Lamb hails from Huron County, so The Citizen swung by the Gross family farm on a snowy afternoon to hear a little bit about how it feels to be a champion.

 

In a nutshell, Gross is feeling good about her historic win. Even though there were a lot of impressive animals in the highly-competitive Junior Sheep Show, Gross was confident that Marlee would do well - she’d spent the summer training her stately animal using a combination of tried and true methods that they teach in 4-H along with techniques she’s been developed alongside her sister, Loralei. 

 

While the girls insist that the specifics of their sheep-rearing techniques remain top secret, they did admit that there is a real advantage to raising their lambs together. From the moment they pick up their lambs from a farm in St. Helens, the sisters put the two young ewes through the training process together. Lonely lambs can make for skittish beasts that show poorly, while lambs that learn in a more natural environment tend to be calmer animals overall. Loralei’s sheep, Maisy, may have placed a little bit lower than Marlee in the competition, but without training alongside Maisy, Marlee may not have had the right attitude to take top prize. Even though it’s technically a competition, the girls prefer to work in tandem to make both their sheep the best sheep it can be. Spending extra time with their sheep outside of standard training sessions is also essential to raising a happy sheep.

 

It also helps that the Gross clan are, collectively, a 4-H-loving family. Their father, Bryan, dabbled in 4-H a little when he was growing up. He didn’t show sheep, but he was in the Vet Club and the Farm Machinery Club. Their mother, Mary Ellen, has a special training secret of her own: if you want your children to fall in love with 4-H, just get them into it before they are old enough to remember a time when they weren’t in 4-H. Gross children typically start learning to show dairy calves at around three years old, and are pretty much expected to find their own path through 4-H from that point onward.

 

Her historic win has made Holly even more passionate about the wild and wooly world of competitive sheep showing, but the rules state that she has to take next year off so someone else’s animal can take a shot at the title of Grand Champion Lamb. Holly, however, is not deterred by the temporary ban. “I can still show at the local fairs, just not the Royal,” she explained.