BAKER CITY - Oregon's once-massive sheep and wool industry is gone, but vestiges remain in back-yard operations like Suzen Fors, who got started raising a few 25 years ago when her daughter raised lambs as a 4H project.

The daughter, Elesa, started with cattle, found there was no money in it and turned to market lambs.

"We got a wether and a ewe. The ewe was so good looking we decided to keep her and raise sheep," Fors said. "She was a good breeder and a good mother."

Fors said she developed a love of the farm life during her own childhood staying at her grandfather's ranch near North Powder.

Although her daughter and a son, Michael, have moved on to careers and families of their own, Furs still raises sheep and a few head of cattle with help from her husband Jack, who wooed her years ago on horseback.

They moved from the Portland-Vancouver area to Baker City in the 1970s to be closer to Fors' grandfather, and to raise their family on a small farm.

Jay Carr, a former longtime Oregon State University Extension Service livestock agent in Baker County, said flocks numbering in the thousands once roamed Baker County.

Today, most of the sheep and wool are produced in what Carr calls "backyard" flocks, ranging from a few head of sheep to 200.

Over the years, Fors said, the family flock grew to 14 head of certified black-faced Suffolk-Hampshire crossbreds, which she maintains despite selling a dozen or more lambs each spring to ranchers and 4-H youths.

Normally, Fors said she has her sheep sheared several weeks before the Tri-County Wool Pool, where growers bring the fleece to market.

Most years, there's enough warm, dry spring days in Baker County for Fors and other "backyard" sheep producers to get their small flocks sheared in time.

But with this year's wet spring, she and many other sheep raisers are still waiting to get their flocks sheared. "You can't shear the sheep when they're wet," she said.

Once, "wool pools were held all over Eastern Oregon. Now, there's just two left one in La Grande and one in Prineville," Carr said, adding that there's also a wool pool or two still operating in Western Oregon.

Oregon sheep numbers peaked in 1930 at nearly 2.6 million. The total has been running between 210,000 and 245,000 during 2000-2008.

Over the past decade, the number of shorn Oregon sheep dropped from 290,000 head to 188,000 head with will production dropping from nearly 1.9 million pounds to less than 1.2 million pounds, and the total value of wool produced statewide has declined from $1.15 million to $690,000.

Wool prices reported by the OSU Extension Service for this wool pool in La Grande vary widely, from $1.05 per pound for wool from white face sheep to 10 cents for black wool.

Carr said a wool buyer from Elliot Woolen Mills in Utah has attended the Tri-County Wool Pool and purchased wool nearly every year for more than a decade, and the mill is expected to attend again this year.