The northernmost inhabited farm in Iceland is the sheep farm Reistarnes on Melrakkaslétta peninsula in North East Iceland. There Kristinn B. Steinarsson and his wife Ágústa Ágústsdóttir tend to their flock of 600 sheep. Kristinn is born and raised at the farm, and has run the farm since 1990.
But the life of a farmer, or his sheep, at the edge of the world is not always easy, as the following photographs show. Ágústa published the pictures and story of the December roundup of the flock on the Facebook page “Shepard´s friends”.
The back story is that on 3 December Ágústa and her husband had to herd a group of ewes who stubbornly leave the farm each fall, after having been herded into home fields. The ewes move into the land of Oddsstaðir, an old nearby farm. Most of the flock at Reistarnes is usually kept outside during the winter, as it snows relatively little in the region. The ewes are fed outside, but they can also graze seaweed on the beach. Only the yearlings are kept inside during the winter.
This year, however, winter came unseasonably early with unusually heavy snows. Ágústa says this year´s snowfall already exceeds the total combined accumulation over the entire winter in recent years. As a consequence the sheep who had wandered off to Oddstaðir had to be brought back to safety.
Ágústa and the farmers from nearby farms teamed up to find and bring the sheep back. Finding the sheep and herding them back took a whole day, from dawn to dusk, but Ágústa says on Facebook that everything went according to plan and all the sheep were escorted to the safety of the home field. Some, however, were pretty tired toward the end of the trip and had to be herded onto the truck and driven the last leg of the journey.
The northernmost inhabited farm in Iceland is the sheep farm Reistarnes on Melrakkaslétta peninsula in North East Iceland. There Kristinn B. Steinarsson and his wife Ágústa Ágústsdóttir tend to their flock of 600 sheep. Kristinn is born and raised at the farm, and has run the farm since 1990.
But the life of a farmer, or his sheep, at the edge of the world is not always easy, as the following photographs show. Ágústa published the pictures and story of the December roundup of the flock on the Facebook page “Shepard´s friends”.
The back story is that on 3 December Ágústa and her husband had to herd a group of ewes who stubbornly leave the farm each fall, after having been herded into home fields. The ewes move into the land of Oddsstaðir, an old nearby farm. Most of the flock at Reistarnes is usually kept outside during the winter, as it snows relatively little in the region. The ewes are fed outside, but they can also graze seaweed on the beach. Only the yearlings are kept inside during the winter.
This year, however, winter came unseasonably early with unusually heavy snows. Ágústa says this year´s snowfall already exceeds the total combined accumulation over the entire winter in recent years. As a consequence the sheep who had wandered off to Oddstaðir had to be brought back to safety.
Ágústa and the farmers from nearby farms teamed up to find and bring the sheep back. Finding the sheep and herding them back took a whole day, from dawn to dusk, but Ágústa says on Facebook that everything went according to plan and all the sheep were escorted to the safety of the home field. Some, however, were pretty tired toward the end of the trip and had to be herded onto the truck and driven the last leg of the journey.
