MENDOCINO CO., 8/8/26 — Fire season’s cutest fuel crew is working Caspar right now: 43 sheep the size of golden retrievers, eating the brush around the community center and growing next year’s wool while they do it. Black is the most common color; some run brown, gray or white. Some sport plain canvas coats to keep stickers out of the fleece — because the fleece is the other half of the paycheck.
They are Ouessant sheep, a rare breed off a windswept island near Brittany, and the name lands close enough to “croissant” that their shepherd, Marie Hoff, calls her crossbreds exactly that. Hoff runs Capella Grazing Project and its wool arm, Full Circle Wool, moving her flock from job to job to eat down fire fuel and selling what grows on their backs to the people who spin it. Fibershed, the Northern California fiber-systems nonprofit, lists hers as the largest Ouessant flock in the West.
“They’re like the size of a golden retriever,” Hoff said in a phone interview Wednesday. Some of the lambs run closer to corgi. “And then I would tell you that there were 43 of them in there, and you’d be like, no way. That is not 43 sheep.”
What a very small sheep can do about fire
Ouessants are what Hoff calls a primitive breed, and that turns out to matter for fire work. They’re browsers — they’ll go after shrubs and tree leaves, not just grass, which is what you want when the point is thinning the understory before fire season.
Hoff is honest about where they rank. “They probably can’t quite keep up with most goats that are used for this type of work,” she said. But she has watched enough animals on enough hillsides to distrust the job title anyway. Not every goat can do fuel-reduction work, she said, and not every sheep. It takes training, and a handler who knows the work.
“It’s not always as simple as just put animals in a field and they’ll do it,” she said.
The flock works with livestock guardian dogs for protection — and no herding dogs at all. Partly the flock is too small to keep one busy. Partly it’s the breed: Ouessants spent thousands of years on their island without ever being bred to obey a dog. “They just see herd dogs and they’re like, oh, predator, we’re going to mess with you,” Hoff said. They tease the dog. A modern breed is more likely to just go where it’s told.
That old-island stubbornness is the same trait that makes them cheap keepers. Hoff draws the contrast with merino sheep, bred so hard for fine wool that the animal now needs constant human maintenance — softer fleece, it turns out, comes with softer hooves. “If you’re breeding for softer fleece, you’re also going to get softer feet,” she said, and softer feet mean broken nails and hoof rot. Leave a merino alone for a year, and it’s in trouble. Leave an Ouessant alone for a year, she said, “they’d be okay.” The fleece wouldn’t be much good to her, but the sheep would be fine. They even have their lambs without her help.
Two sheep in a Prius
The whole operation traces to a Prius. In 2013 Hoff was farm-sitting for Leslie Adkins, the Santa Rosa fiber artist behind Heart Felt Fiber Farm, who had gone east to visit the farm Hoff says was the first to breed Ouessants in the United States — “claiming, you know, just to look at them.” Adkins came back with two of them in the back of her Prius, stopping to walk them along the highway. She wanted more of the breed in California than her own land could hold, and she started nudging her farm-sitter: you should do this. You should just start.
Hoff was about 30, new to agriculture, learning sheep and vineyard grazing, living in west Sonoma County and certain she would never own land there. A friend offered about a half acre of vineyard and a little ground beyond it. “How can I say no to this?” she said. “There’s sheep being offered, there’s land being offered.” She started with seven ewes.
Wool with a name on it
The wool side sells the way the sheep live — one animal at a time. Hoff runs a sheep sponsorship program she describes as a farm club: there are exactly as many sponsorships each year as there are lambs born. A sponsor pays a flat rate, gets the raw fleece off their particular lamb, follows the flock through regular emails — where the sheep are, what they’re working on, who’s up to what — and gets to name the lamb.
Locals come out for shearing day. For sponsors on the East Coast, Hoff has run Zoom calls with the sheep, which found their audience during the pandemic. Most of her buyers are people who can do something with a raw fleece — handspinners, mostly. “It’s really more of an experience than just a product,” Hoff said.
The wool carries a credential, too. Full Circle Wool sells fiber verified Climate Beneficial by Fibershed — on the company’s site, that means the wool grew on a farm or ranch operating under a carbon farm plan, a document drawn up with a third-party biologist that identifies and measures the practices pulling carbon out of the air and into the soil.
It’s also, at the farmers market, an ongoing education. “There’s still some people who are just surprised to learn that we have sheep in California at all,” Hoff said.
For now the flock is easy to find, working the brush around the Caspar Community Center, near the pond trail that opened in late July. Thirteen years on from those seven ewes, Hoff’s count is 45.
“They’ve been breeding,” she said.
The sheep munch through the workday, while under the canvas jackets, the other half of the paycheck is growing.