Signal Rock Farm

High Quality Hay For Horses, Sheep, Llama's, Alpaca's, Goats and Cows,                               Hay Huts, and Wool Products Our Sheep Are Not For Sale We no longer sell lamb meat, never sold other meats. Our Farm About Us Directions To Our Farm Contact Us Join Our Mailing List Directions To Our Farm Join Our Mailing List Signal Rock Stables Horse Boarders Dream Stables About Stables Gallery Stables Contact Our Wool Products Wool Why It's So Special How Wool Blankets Are Made Wool Why It's So Special How Wool Blankets Are Made Welcome to Signal Rock Farm - a dream come true for my husband and I - Kevin and Marianne Mc Carthy.  We purchased the 245 acre farm in August 2005 after many years of looking and dreaming.  Kevin wanted a place where he could make lots and lots of hay so of course he could have all the tractors and attachments that go with that and a big barn to store all the hay in.  I just wanted to live on a farm, always thought it would be a wonderful place to be, with lots of room for riding horses and keeping some other animals too.  Neither of us grew up on a farm but Kevin had spent summers in Wigtown, Scotland on his Aunt and Uncles farm and loved it.  I grew up in a small town with a small yard but loved to visit my friends who lived out in the country - little did I know all the work that went into those lovely farms! We started farming in North Kingstown, RI on the 3.5 acres that was left of the original Signal Rock Farm.  We updated the 1860 farm house and improved the land, fixing stone walls and fences, planting perennial flower beds and clearing brush off what had once been pasture. We kept a horse and dogs and had a very large vegetable garden, selling the surplus vegetables at a small farm stand in front of the house.  We both had jobs in the IT field but craved the great outdoors. Although we both enjoyed the vegetable garden, I really wanted to work with animals and Kevin wanted to make hay.  As our dreams evolved a plan developed where I could work on the farm too.  I would milk sheep and have cheese made with the milk, sell grass fed lamb meat and wonderful wool products.  We decided to try this out on a small scale, while still looking for a farm to buy.  I purchased 3 wet dairy sheep and a ram lamb to use in the fall for breeding, and began milking them by hand.  We drank the fresh, raw milk daily and froze what we couldn’t for later use. The raw milk being especially high in protein and vitamins A and D is a wonderful energy drink. Sheep milk is naturally homogenized so it can be frozen in small quantities.  By the end of the season I had decided this was what I really wanted to do.  I spent the next several months putting together a business plan for a sheep dairy operation.  I pored over numerous books on the care and feeding of sheep, milking sheep, lambing sheep - which was particularly scary to me.  I called sheep and goat dairy farmers and picked their brains, went and visited those that had the time to spare. Grass fed dairy sheep requires a lot of open land for grazing and haying which is in short supply within an hour radius of Boston – which was our target location. We had a very difficult time even finding farms to look at in Rhode Island, central Massachusetts and eastern Connecticut, much less one we could afford.  The plan was for Kevin to keep his day job in Boston for a few years, while I gave up my day job and went full time into farming.  In the end, we were both full time farming it seemed while Kevin was still working in Boston.  We found a flock of dairy sheep we could buy with excellent genetics for producing lots of milk with great butter fat and great tasting quality lamb meat. The farmer asked us to rent her 30+ acre farm, located in Colrain, MA, two and a half hours from Boston.  This was not in our target location, it was just too far away from Boston and the farm would be too small for our needs after two or three years. ​ However, after much frustration in not