TUNBRIDGE — Whether it was mowing lawns to earn spending money in middle school or biking 20 miles to help out at a vegetable farm while working as a newspaper copy editor, Mary Lake has been hustling since she was a child.

“I guess my biggest fear is that I worked too hard,” Lake said from her farm in Tunbridge where she lives with her husband, Paul Smith, and their children, Hugo and Garth.

Lake is one of the only professional sheep shearers in Vermont. In addition to tending to her own flock of 70 or so Icelandic sheep, she shears for some 200 farms across New England, performs on-farm butchering and coordinates shearing workshops in Tunbridge and at the Vermont Shearing School in Shelburne, Vt.

In early June, she finished third in her division at the United States Shearing Championship in Roseburg, Ore.

“She’s the most well-known name (in Vermont) and it is incredible that she’s built that,” said fellow shearer, Leslie Sullivan, who learned the craft under Lake.

Getting to this point in her career has taken years of dedication, and began with a reverence for farming as a child.

The youngest of five siblings, Lake, 41, grew up on South Hero, Vt., one of the largest islands on Lake Champlain, back when the island was mostly orchards and dairy farms. Her mother was a teaching assistant at an elementary school, and her father worked a number of jobs, including a custodian at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vt., until he landed at International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM.

“We weren’t super poor, but we weren’t middle class,” Lake said. “We were in the lower tier…”

Lake learned to be resourceful from a young age and started saving money in middle school through babysitting, and collecting bottles and cans that could be exchanged for cash.

Her family sourced most of their food from neighboring farms or food that “was really cheap,” Lake said.

“I definitely grew up thinking that farmers were very valuable,” she said. “They were people that are crucial to the community.”

But that view wasn’t necessarily mirrored in the world around her. “Nobody was like, ‘You should grow up and become a farmer,’ ” she said.

In the late ’90s, Lake attended Essex High School, on the mainland, where she learned about globalization and her ideas around food began to shift. She set up a composting program at her school and became a vegetarian, though she started eating meat again as an adult.

After graduating in 2002, Lake enrolled in the journalism program at Saint Michael’s College. Her biggest concern was acquiring “a skill she could make money from” so she could support herself, she said.

Lake wasn’t too excited about staying near home for college, but classmates from out-of-state, like her now husband, Paul Smith, whom Lake met on the first day of classes, helped her see Vermont in a new light.

“I didn’t want to be a New Yorker forever,” said Smith, who grew up in the Catskills. Compared to the well-to-do atmosphere of upstate New York with its influx of wealthy second home owners, Vermont seemed like a “really chill place to hang out,” he said.

After finishing up college in 2006, Lake and Smith wanted to get out of the area, but after the sudden death of a close friend days before graduation, they decided to stick around Burlington.

Lake got a job as a copy editor at the Burlington Free Press, and Smith worked at Outdoor Gear Exchange, a wilderness sports shop in the city’s downtown, and at City Market, a health food store.

At the same time, Lake also worked at a vegetable farm on Grand Isle, which she’d trek to on her bike, about 20 miles each way.

She’d achieved her goal of finding employment after college, but working in journalism wasn’t as fulfilling as Lake had hoped and “it didn’t feel as valuable as farming,” she said.

After less than a year at the Free Press, Lake quit to work at the vegetable farm full-time, while freelancing for the Essex Reporter and other area publications for extra money.

“I found myself getting super excited about all the stories that were about farms,” said Lake, whose reporting took her to the Tunbridge area, where she and Smith eventually bought a home.

She started to speak more with the farmers who sold their products at City Market and connected with shepherd Helen Whybrow at Knoll Farm in Fayston, Vt., where Lake worked for five years.

Whybrow taught Lake about animal husbandry, including how to gauge imperfections in a sheep’s wool and how to guide a flock.

Today, Lake feels it’s those skills that help her “stand out from other shearers,” she said.

Lake also took a course at the Vermont Shearing School, which she now helps run, where she learned from instructors like competitive blade shearer Kevin Ford.

Something clicked for Lake the first time she sheared a sheep. “It was like a body reaction,” she said. “Like, my body wants to do that.”

She recalled watching a demonstration by a French-Canadian shearer who slung her son over her back and had him guide the machine while she maneuvered the sheep with her legs.

“I walked away from that school being like, ‘I want to be a shearer, I want to shear competitively and I want to be a mom,” Lake said.

Shearing was also another way to make money, and the new skill brought her one step closer to her ultimate goal of owning her own sheep farm.

In 2009, Lake was tasked with bringing 10 Knoll Farm lambs to a slaughterhouse for processing. Days later, the slaughterhouse was shut down for inhumane treatment of animals.

”I was pretty mad at myself,” Lake said. “I felt really naive. And I was like, I don’t ever want to feel like that again.”

After asking around for a reputable slaughterhouse, she approached the Royal Butcher in Braintree, Vt. about training on the kill floor. Even though she had no experience, the manager at the time decided to give her a shot. For the next five years, Lake trained under head butcher Dan Graham, who taught her how to slaughter and process animals ranging from lambs to bovines.

Mastering the skills of butchery was hard work, and Graham remembers Lake easily getting frustrated.

“She wanted to learn how to do it right,” said Graham, recalling Lake’s meticulous attention to detail. “She was always striving to get more knowledge, to learn the most techniques.”

While working at the Royal Butcher, Lake learned to use a captive bolt gun, an ethical slaughter tool, and discovered other humane slaughtering methods based on the work of animal rights activist Temple Grandin.

She no longer felt naive the way she had when she dropped those lambs off years before. “I put the fear right on its head,” she said.

In 2015, Lake, who worked up until her due date, left the Royal Butcher to have her first child, Hugo.

After Hugo was born, the cost of childcare made returning to the Royal Butcher impractical, so Lake started to look into on-farm slaughter, in which a farmer sells an animal to a customer live, and a butcher processes the meat on site.

She also began to build a roster of farms where she could shear because she could bring Hugo along.

By the time the coronavirus pandemic struck in 2020, Lake was working more than ever, “which felt good,” she said. She and Smith had bought a farm in Tunbridge a few years prior.

Lake started doing more instructional work, teaching slaughtering workshops through Rural Vermont, a nonprofit and agricultural advocacy group.

“Mary is really a mentor for me,” said Caroline Sherman-Gordon, who works as a legislative director for Rural Vermont and hosts workshops at Fool’s Farm in Tunbridge, which she owns with her wife Elspeth Sherman-Gordon.

Caroline Sherman-Gordon admired the way Lake was able to educate new farmers about best practices when it comes to shearing and processing their animals. “She’s not judgmental,” Sherman-Gordon said. “She’s just so passionate about everything she does.”

But working with new farmers, especially those who mishandle their sheep due to lack of experience, can be frustrating, Lake said.

It makes her wonder if “everything I’ve spent my life doing they thought was something not worthy of that much thought,” she said. “I feel the disrespect of it.”

Two summers ago, Lake decided to try her hand at a blade-shearing competition in Maine, where she was competing against members of the US national team, who’d just returned from the international championship, Golden Shears, in Scotland. Lake finished sixth out of six people, though not by much. Undaunted, she entered the national competition in South Dakota, where she was the only shepherd-shearer and one of the only shearers with kids.

“It kind of just brought legitimacy to our industry here in the North East,” where, unlike out West, it’s possible to raise a family and be a shearer because farms are so close together, Lake said.

The other piece that makes it possible for Lake to raise a family and be on the road shearing, is how she and Smith share the responsibilities of parenthood.

“For her to be able to do what she wants to do, somebody’s got to maintain the fort. That’s what I’ve been trying to do, just really be supportive of her,” said Smith, who works in special education in Williamstown, Vt.

“We like to keep things extremely balanced, and that’s probably been the strongest feature in our relationship,” Lake said.

After coming in third place in blade shearing at the South Dakota competition, Lake participated in the national competition in Oregon this June.

Days before the competition Lake and Sullivan, along with other competitors, took a blade-shearing workshop with Michael Pora, a renowned shearer from Australia.

“He helped us get in the zone and helped us with a lot of positive thinking,” said Lake, who tried to follow Pora’s lead and say words of encouragement to herself.

Even with all the shearing skills she’s developed in recent decades, Lake still deals with self-doubt. “What creeps into my head is that there’s this possibility that I actually don’t know what I’m doing,” she said. “I think the root of it is I’ve been shearing by myself my whole career.”

Lake came back from Oregon with newfound confidence. She knew she could cut it with the best of them.

Marion Umpleby can be reached at mumpleby@vnews.com or 603-727- 3306.