The Lambs of God

Peter and Diane Dickinson grew up on farms about as far apart as North America will allow. He’s a Long Island native, she’s a Calgary cowgirl. Their planets began aligning when Peter moved to little Carney, Oklahoma – a burg located northeast of Oklahoma City that recently made national headlines when a tornado threatened to remove it from the map – and Diane to Chandler. They met 30 years ago as college students, both drawn to the ag-friendly environs of Oklahoma State University.

Twenty-two years ago, they found their calling in Shepherd’s Cross, “a working farm and Christian mission,” in a lush, hilly part of Oklahoma about as wildly different from the hard-bitten plains as any outsider could imagine.

On the farm, they shepherd 150 head of Jacob and Suffolk, a British production cross-breed whose wool and meat they sell out of a big red barn with a general store on the ground floor and a teaching museum aloft. You can buy packaged meat out of the downstairs freezer, but it’s in the loft where the story of Shepherd’s Cross unfolds.

There are science-fair style exhibits cataloguing state birds and flowers and pickled biological specimens of the chordata and arthropoda of the 46th state. Next to a David and Goliath play set, action figures included, sits an arrangement that includes a ram skull, a slingshot of wool, and shofar trumpets. An accompanying text panel reads:

“Sheep are an important part of the global agricultural economy, but they have been replaced in most part by other livestock species, such as cow, chicken and pig in America [sic].”

Sheep numbers peaked, according to a USDA statistic, in 1884 at 51 million head. At a mere 6 million head today, sheep have all but fallen off the map. But that doesn’t deter the Dickinsons, who feel they’ve found, in sheep, a symbol for societal ills.

‘The mission here is twofold. To teach people about farming, so we can continue to have farms to feed the people, so that farms are not extinct and the next generation has to depend on other nations to provide their food. And to teach about farming and its relation to the Bible.’

“The mission here is twofold,” Diane says. “To teach people about farming, so we can continue to have farms to feed the people, so that farms are not extinct and the next generation has to depend on other nations to provide their food.

“And,” she says, barely missing a beat, “to teach about farming and its relation to the Bible.”

Farmers, especially in Oklahoma, tend to be a God-fearing lot, but they generally separate church from state when it came to things agrarian. Shepherd’s Cross makes no such distinction. Old and New Testament verses dot the landscape here, nailed to fence post and haystack alike. They quote freely – in the King’s best English – those scriptures that equate the fallen faithful to grains of corn and flocks of lost sheep. Before Diane will answer questions or stand for photos, she closes her eyes and bows her straw-hatted head to “invite the greatest Farmer of all” to bless the journalistic proceedings.

“It was written to farmers,” Diane, a doctor of veterinary medicine, says of the King James Bible. “We have tried to do things more biblically, which is natural. And sheep eating grass, and peaceful shepherding, walking, not using four-wheelers – going back to the basics.”

Beyond the barn is a pond where a gaggle of white geese congregated near a stand of reeds. Nearby is a sign posted to the wood-rail fence. “American Lamb – Fresh Homegrown Flavor.”

The slogan carries a clever barb. American Lamb, a promotional board seeking to get Americans to eat more sheep, is seeking a very specific type of consumer. (Americans ate less than a pound of lamb and mutton per capita in 2011, versus 57 pounds of commodity beef.) Using the locavore movement as its mantra, the aim of American Lamb is to wean Americans off the taste of imported meat.

“We target the adventurous foodies that are looking for high-quality, flavorful foods,” says Megan Wortman, executive director. “They are well-educated, love food, entertaining, eating out, travel, care about nutrition and want to know where their food comes from.”

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Shepherd’s Cross isn’t after foodies or restaurant chefs. The Dickinsons don’t regard sheep as the latest craze. They open their land to agritourists, track the latest Farm Bill maneuvering and stake their claim on the other red meat because they believe sheep are nothing shy of the national salvation.

“Jesus said we’re supposed to be sheep and he’s the sheep of God, he’s the ram lamb of God,” Diane says. “But we’ve taken this [sheep meat] and said it’s a not a good thing. But it is a good thing. We’re not supposed to be cows for God. We’re really eating a low-quality meat and accepting it.”

‘Jesus said we’re supposed to be sheep and he’s the sheep of God, he’s the ram lamb of God. But we’ve taken sheep meat and said it’s a not a good thing. But it is a good thing. We’re not supposed to be cows for God.’

This is zealous stuff, even in the buckle of the Bible Belt. Underlying the dogma, though, is an ethic being repeated, if more secularly, across the land. Either way, it’s a big Zion to climb.

“Every single group that comes, I ask them why we have farms and they can’t answer it,” Diane says. “Maybe one out of a hundred. There’s a total disconnect, because we’re two or three generations removed from farming.”

That disconnect, as she calls it, is never more pronounced than in spring, when lambs bounce in the clover and Shepherd’s Cross hosts its Wooly Weekends, which include lamb (under a year, generally) and mutton (older) taste tests. Many visitors flat out refuse. Perhaps they’re missing the twin message. While the bulk of the weekenders who came to the farm this fall to take $5 hayrides, pose for pumpkin-framed photos and sit for a loft viewing of “Percy the Perfect Pumpkin” – a Christian allegory in which the trials and triumph of Jesus are embodied in a bright orange gourd – more seem drawn to the jars of pumpkin butter than they do the deep freeze of sheep and lamb meat.

“People just get their food from a store and they don’t think anything about it,” Diane says. While this might explain the reluctance to chew something as adorable – and, in this neck of the woods, symbolic – as a prancing lamb, it doesn’t address taste. That, Dickinson says, is a product of poor practice.

“Because they haven’t tasted pasture-raised, organic or natural meat, they don’t know what it tastes like. Most of the time we’ve been feeding them corn. And corn taints the meat of sheep. A feedlot taints the meat of sheep. It tastes completely different.”

She laughs after telling a story, all too typical, of cooks confessing they’re ignorant and even a little frightened of how to prepare anything as exotic as lamb. But her cackle has a frenzied edge to it that indicates this is no laughing matter.

“Farmers are almost extinct,” Diane says. “We’re a minority – one percent of the whole population of the United States – and most of us are gray. Soon, we’ll be down to half a percent. A half a percent of the population producing all the food to feed people, this is not looking good.”

(All images courtesy Shepherd’s Cross.)