Answering the most common questions I get asked as a sheep farmer!

Join me as I answer the most common questions I get asked when people find out I'm a sheep farmer.

My story:
Hi, I’m Cailyn and I’m the farmer behind The Farm at Beagle Hill. A year ago, my husband and I moved from Brooklyn, New York to our new home in the Finger Lakes region. This was something that we had been talking about for a couple years, and in December of 2023 we found the perfect property—a 200-year-old farmhouse situated on 19 acres of pasture with 2 barns and a pond. We quickly started calling it The Eloise Beagle Park, after our beagle, Eloise, but we knew that The Eloise Beagle Park was a confusing name for a farm, so since we live at the top of a hill, we decided to name it Beagle Hill and thus The Farm at Beagle Hill was created!

Prior to starting the farm, I was a sweater designer for Macys—designing most recently for Charter Club Cashmere. Since my role was almost entirely remote, I had planned to continue working for Macy’s and commute into the city a couple days a month, but unfortunately, a few weeks after we closed on the house, our new CEO decided that the company would be returning to the office full time and that all employees who lived outside of the determined “commuting area” would be terminated in August of 2024. This obviously wasn’t going to work for me, so I took a role at Cornell in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

I’ve been knitting since I was about 10 and now, I’m extremely passionate about sweaters. For a while, working in design was a great way to scratch that itch but I came to realize just how unsustainable and harmful the fashion industry is, and I began to think about how I could approach sweater design in a more sustainable way. In May of 2022, I attended the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival—I specifically wanted to hear Clara Parkes speak about her experience of turning raw wool into finished yarn, I loved reading her book The Vanishing Fleece and felt like she might have the answers I was looking for. By the time her seminar concluded, I felt positively radicalized.

Everyone in that room was asking the same questions I had been asking myself for years: Why aren’t we supporting farmers and utilizing the wool grown in the US for apparel or other goods? Why aren’t we supporting our domestic fiber mills and manufacturing centers? We aren’t we doing more to keep the US textile industry from disappearing entirely?

And I realized that out of that entire room, I was perhaps one of the few people in a position to make a difference—I was a designer at Macy’s, and I had a say in where our material goods were sourced from. When I got back from Maryland, I put together a presentation and shared it with a senior designer and my design director. I got positive feedback but ultimately it went nowhere, I pushed several times and continued to talk with leadership about utilizing American wool and creating a small run of American made sweaters. Again, positive feedback but still no action—sometimes I would get a response like, this is too complicated, it’s easier and cheaper to source yarn overseas…Where would we start, how do you even begin to make yarn from raw wool? Despite reminding leadership that American yarn companies already exist and that several knitting factories were in NY and could meet our needs for a small run of sweaters, I was getting nowhere.

Then I did what every eldest daughter eventually does, I made up my mind to do it myself. So now, we live on a farm, and we just brought home our first sheep. My apparel label is reopening in Fall 2026 and then who knows what! I hope that despite my obvious lack of video experience, you decided to stick around, I can’t wait to show y’all what all we have planned for the farm.