This El Paso County agriculture operation turned bullish on sheep
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BLACK FOREST — It’s not just that the grass is greener on the other side of Will Vogl’s portable electric fence.
Within the rectangular paddock where a few dozen of his hair sheep — a type bred primarily for meat rather than wool — have been grazing on half of a homeowner’s small acreage, the animals have already given this slice of high plains pastureland a buzzcut. It’s time to move on to the second course.
And so Vogl, a 37-year-old fulltime firefighter and steward of the flock, funnels his charges, scampering and bounding, through an opening into the adjacent pasture. Here they’ll spend the next few days chowing down on the taller vegetation, reducing weeds, stirring up the ground and leaving pebble-sized droppings.
Repeated over three years or so, the process helps the soil grow healthier. Thicker grasses crowd out the weeds. And thanks to the animals’ affable personalities, residents of these homes Vogl describes as “rural suburbia” pay him to provide the aesthetic trappings of the ag life that also allow them to skip the costly rituals of mowing and pesticides.
His agricultural operation, Vogl Homestead Farm, aims to rehabilitate properties all around his El Paso County base by restoring healthier soil, improving water retention and mitigating wildfire danger. It’s a small-scale solution, essentially a one-man operation. But it attacks the problem acre by acre with a strategy of rotational grazing, one small part of a regenerative agriculture movement gathering momentum in Colorado and nationwide.
In the Cherry Creek Springs development, a collection of 115 parcels of at least 5 acres about 10 minutes east of Monument, Vogl has found an eager clientele among individual homeowners within this rolling landscape on the northern edge of the Black Forest.
“They want the space,” he says of the residents. “They don’t want to be on top of their neighbors anymore, and they kind of get to a point where they realize they need to do something with the land. But they just don’t know exactly what they want to do with it.”
Vogl offers conservation-minded alternatives. Throughout the summer, he removes the stress of owning and caring for animals while letting residents feel the joy of having them around. A small solar array electrifies the portable fencing he uses to subdivide a property for the most efficient grazing. If necessary, he can provide his own water troughs. He explains how targeted grazing, rather than mowing, improves the land.
Often, he says, it becomes a multiyear process. It can take that long to fully reclaim the soil and push out the weeds. But also, people tend to like having the sheep around.
Vogl encourages them to interact with the animals, top off their water or feed them some excess produce. So the operation becomes more than a grazing service. It’s an experience.
“I have a strong belief after doing this for so long and seeing how much people love being around this that we instinctively have a connection to animals like this,” he says. “Grazing animals, that’s the oldest form of agriculture we have, and I think there’s an instinctual part of us that still connects to that a little bit.”
Occasionally, Vogl finds that after a year or two, a client considers keeping some animals permanently. He might end up selling a homeowner one of his ewes and advising them on splitting their pasture into smaller paddocks for rotational grazing.
“How fast can I get him in here?”
Not far from where Vogl rotates his flock to new territory, Jennifer Cameron tends a 5-acre horse property with about 3.5 acres of pasture. The previous owners, she says, didn’t manage the land well, which means for the past 13 years she’s been fighting weeds and learning to avoid herbicides that never seemed to work anyway.
This year, Cameron stumbled upon Vogl’s operation through the subdivision’s HOA, which last year had invited the sheep to graze on the open space, which she says now looks better than it ever has. So she thought: Why not? Besides, Vogl’s price to let his sheep loose on her pasture turned out to be less than a single chemical application.
In a little more than five days they’d grazed her pasture with results she calls “absolutely incredible.” Additionally, she found that Vogl deftly moved the flock from property to property with minimal disruption to the community’s everyday routine.
“I didn’t hear what I thought we might hear,” Cameron notes, “like neighbors saying they make a lot of noise, or it was inconvenient because his trailer was on the road. Nobody said that — everybody was like, wow! And our next door neighbor is like, ‘How fast can I get him in here?’ Everybody loved it.”
She particularly enjoyed sitting on her deck just after nightfall with the sheep bleating softly in the distance as they settled in. Grandchildren made trips to the house just to stand and watch. Neighbors showed up in the morning with a cup of coffee to take in the show.
She noticed only one potential downside.
“If you’re working in your yard, you’ll get nothing done because you’ll be so busy watching them,” she laughs. “Especially if there’s little ones, because they’re hilarious.”
But Vogl takes the conservation outcomes quite seriously.
“If we can improve the soil by working with nature’s processes,” he explains, “we can actually long-term push a lot of these weed varieties completely out without using chemicals at all.”
The connection with Cherry Creek Springs began last year through Vogl’s acquaintance with Norman Habermehl, the caretaker for the HOA’s common interest property. Habermehl was looking for a way to help manage 65 acres of common space, primarily through wildfire mitigation and weed control.
He reached out to see if Vogl would be interested in paying a nominal fee to graze his sheep on the landscape. It’s close to his home property and provides convenient grazing when they aren’t otherwise deployed. The HOA gained some income. Vogl gained clients when homeowners like Cameron got curious about his sheep.
“One thing that’s been quite interesting for us is some of this land that’s been grazed has come back green and lush,” Habermehl says. “It’s probably just natural aeration from the hooves, and a little manure never hurts anything.”
The first year, the manure did trigger some complaints from residents who didn’t like stepping in it along the community’s trails. Modifying the portable fencing to keep the sheep off the trails solved that problem. Habermehl notes that reaction to having Vogl’s flock on the land has been generally positive.
“It’s been a great tool for fire mitigation,” he says. “When I look at what we’ve got grazed down from last year and this year, it’s not much of a problem anymore.”
Cameron figures she’ll have Vogl’s sheep back every other year. Meanwhile, she’s eager to see how the pasture responds in the spring.
“Given how it looks now,” she says, “I am so excited about it. It is such a neat concept.”
Early lessons of drought
As a kid, Vogl watched his parents raise beef to sell direct to consumers and followed those footsteps through his involvement in 4-H, which helped him develop a small herd of his own. But in 2002, when he was 12, drought struck, and the family’s full section — 640 acres — in far southeastern El Paso County didn’t see a drop of rain for nine months.
The conditions triggered a familiar sequence: Nothing grew. The cattle couldn’t feed on the land, adding the expense of buying hay to the budget. Ranchers sold their stock, sometimes for pennies on the dollar, while feed prices skyrocketed.
Vogl’s parents abandoned their cattle operation and sold off their land to cover the bills. But he never lost his love for raising animals, and knew that some day, in some capacity, he’d give it another shot.
Meanwhile, he took a detour to college, with an engineering major at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. But a fascination with firefighting, rekindled from his high school days, led him to drop out of UCCS and enroll in the fire science program at Pikes Peak Community College. At the same time, he started volunteering with the Palmer Lake Fire Department and eventually got hired by Monument, which offered a program that paid for his college.
He joined the department fulltime in 2013. But his agricultural roots remained close to the surface, cultivated on a 7-acre property he and his wife, Karissa, purchased on the northern end of the Black Forest. His firefighter’s schedule — 48 hours on, four days off — created the window to revive the interest that had withered with the drought.
They began with a garden. Then came chickens. And more chickens until their collection hovered around 100 laying hens and Vogl started thinking maybe he could turn their little operation — market gardening and eggs — into an actual business that would, at the least, become a self-funding proposition.
In the meantime, he started learning about regenerative agriculture, which he describes as “really just a broad term for farming in a way that improves the land instead of degrading it over time.” Built on principles around soil health, the topic induced him to read extensively and seek to adapt the practice to Colorado’s arid climate.
Discovering hair sheep
Meanwhile, something else caught his attention: sheep. They presented a viable livestock alternative for his own property that, he knew from experience, was too small to support cattle. And as he looked further into sheep, he discovered hair sheep, a type generally bred for meat that grows and sheds hair, rather than produce wool.
The Vogls bought a flock of 22 hair sheep, 14 adults and eight lambs, in 2019. From that initial investment, Vogl has seen the flock peak at about 185 this summer. Grazing fees he charges homeowners on their small acreage go right back into the business.
He has added another facet to his operation. On heavily forested properties where clients are looking for wildfire mitigation, Vogl removes small ponderosa pines during a narrow window in the spring, when they can best tolerate transplanting. Then he sells them to landowners playing “the long game” of forest reclamation. The practice, which grew popular in the Black Forest in the immediate aftermath of the 2013 fire, now accounts for about half of the farm’s income.
“It kind of fits back into the whole theme of good stewardship,” Vogl says, “because a lot of these patches that we’re digging up, there’s literally hundreds of them within just a couple hundred square feet. We’re thinning them out because there’s no way for these trees to survive in that density.”
Salaries from their day jobs — Karissa works as a paraprofessional in their sons’ school — cover living expenses, leaving whatever revenue the agricultural side brings in to be reinvested and grow the operation.
Vogl used to sell meat, but processing and delivery became too labor intensive to make economic sense. Now, he sells some of the live ram lambs, but most of the sheep remain with him. Vogl says he’s getting better at identifying when one may not survive another winter, and then finding them a better home.
Composting, while a big part of his work on his own 7 acres, hasn’t reached the point where he’d consider doing it commercially. Although federal grant funding helped him expand his composting operation, the Trump administration slashed that money and Vogl shifted to a state grant that helps continue his work using compost as a means to hold soil moisture longer and improve grass growth.
Piles of compost in varying levels of decomposition line one dirt drive on his property, some with protruding pipes that conduct oxygen to accelerate the process. The Vogl farm has become a community repository for everything from neighbors’ horse manure, to slash from wildfire mitigation, to post-Halloween pumpkins to animal carcasses. He accepts roadkill or deer that randomly die on nearby properties — or even horses that have been put down.
“People that have followed our farm for a while really like the idea of actually composting them, so that we could take them and turn them back into a soil that we put on our pasture,” he says. “And it becomes a circle of life thing.”
Currently, he sets a goal of creating between 80 to 120 cubic yards of compost per year. While Vogl sees “phenomenal benefits” from spreading it across his own pasture, he’d like to accrue more long-term data to determine if the methods should be applied as a model for creating more drought-tolerant landscapes. Vogl also keeps tabs on the water table on his property, where a side channel from East Cherry Creek gives him the opportunity to track whether compost-treated land holds moisture longer.
“So it’s not like we get a big rainstorm and it flushes out right away,” he says. “Instead, we’re actually turning our soils into a bank account for water, essentially.”
Fire mitigation — and entertainment
Bob Griffis bought his property off Black Forest Road in 2020, seven years after wildfire swept through, claiming 500 homes but sparing his 4 partially forested acres. As the new steward of the property, he didn’t want to rely on luck, if there was a next time. Three years ago, he approached Vogl with a single goal: wildfire mitigation.
The flock of sheep itself, in addition to applying the tools of appetite, soil disturbance and waste to restoring grassland, also can serve the same fire-preventive function that migrating herds of deer and elk once provided in forested areas. Those wild herds, a big component of keeping forests thinned out and healthy, trampled seedlings, stripped away lower branches and generally reduced excess fuel that could make the forest susceptible to ground fire.
“We were looking for ways of making our property more secure,” Griffis says.
The first year Griffis hired Vogl, 93 sheep grazed the property over about two and a half weeks. In the second year, only about 14 to 16 animals grazed for an extended period. Griffis noticed more native plants springing up. Now, in the third year of hosting the sheep, he has expanded his aim toward improving the soil and helping the forest regenerate.
As he has cut down trees infested with drought-driven bark beetles, Griffis has also noticed that the sheep grind the wood chips, sawdust and pine needles into the ground, further improving the soil profile.
“We’re starting to see more of the native plants returning, so more wildflowers,” he says. “There’s a particular ground cover that, according to my neighbors, hasn’t been here since the fire. It started coming back in patches on our property.”
Griffis estimates he’ll have the sheep on his property for another couple of weeks before they’ve grazed all of his land, which he says is about 50% forested areas. Already, a neighbor has jumped on the bandwagon to enlist the sheep in clearing out and improving a large garden area.
But for all the convenience and economy of the animals’ visit, he’s found that it’s hard to put a price on the sheer joy of having them around.
“He doesn’t charge much for this,” Griffis figures, “and I’m just, like, ‘Will, here’s 50 more bucks for the entertainment.’ These things are just fun.”
