MOUNT SIDNEY -- The wooden doors flap open. Doug Hoolsema grabs two fistfuls of matted wool, drags the lamb out onto the plywood slab and tucks one of its legs under his thigh.

Clicking on the clippers, he first goes for the throat, opening up the wool around the front of the neck, and takes a long "blow" across the chest and down to the belly. The lamb, wedged between Hoolsema's knees, sits upright like a stuffed animal, the clippers crossing its tummy in a way that might tickle.

At 54, Hoolsema, a 40-year veteran of the shearing trade, makes the task of pinning down this wiggling sheep look effortless.

"The best shearers are astounding athletes," pipes up Leo Tammi, owner of Shamoka Run Farm in Augusta County, where Hoolsema and his partner, Sy Caryl, are working on this blustery February day. The two shearers arrived at 5 a.m., driving all night from Michigan to clip this 648-head flock, but three hours into the job, neither one looks as if he's broken a sweat.

In this corner of the farming industry, shearers are prized tradesmen, admired as much for their physical stamina as for the vital service they provide to sheep producers, who rely on them to keep their flocks clipped, cool and parasite-free in the summer months.

But over the past decade, this work force has begun to thin out in parts of Western Virginia, a region that once boasted the highest sheep production across the country. As veteran shearers retire, either because of age, injury or fatigue, fewer young people are lining up to tackle this labor-intensive occupation, leaving farmers each year scrambling to fill the gap.

The labor pinch has become so acute in some areas of Virginia, where sheep are raised mostly for meat, not high-end wool, that farmers are switching to so-called hair sheep, wool-less breeds that don't require yearly trims because their coats shed naturally in warm weather.

Shearing is a back-straining trade -- workers spend most of their day stooped over the animal, carrying its body weight on the balls of their feet.

It is also an occupation steeped in tradition with centuries-old roots and a colorful subculture that has sprung up around it. Shearers have their own competitions, folk songs and technical lingo -- a "blow," for example, means a stroke of the clippers.

Still there is no way to accurately count the number of working shearers in the country -- most jobs are seasonal and passed along by word of mouth. Many farmers agree that finding a shearer is increasingly becoming a chore.

In far Southwest Virginia, for instance, part-time shearer Clinton Bell said he is one of only two shearers he knows of working in the region, which, according to state agricultural statistics, had about 22,000 head of sheep in 2006.

Part-time shearer Phil Keefer, who manages the sheep barn at Virginia Tech, said, "There used to be several people from West Virginia that would come in to do the larger flocks, but they left a couple years ago."

Even in Augusta County, the state's top producer of sheep, the shortage has become so that farmers such as Tammi are shearing a couple of weeks ahead of schedule to accommodate shearers' tight schedules. "When it comes to shearing, the shear is boss" he noted.

By noon, the Shamoka Run barn sounds like a barber shop, filled with the buzz of clippers.

One by one, the newly shorn sheep come stumbling off the plywood, their buzzed coats crisscrossed with clipper tracks that look like lawn mower patterns.

Tammi circles the shearing floor, his border collie, Dusk, at his heels, rolling up the wool fleeces and stuffing them in a 7-foot-tall plastic chute.

Hiring a shearer wasn't always difficult, farmers say, but about 10 years ago, the Virginia sheep industry began to shrink rapidly because of low lamb prices and an influx of coyotes.

By 2004, the number of sheep in the state hit a record low of 55,000 head, half of what it was a decade ago when the population was more than 100,000, according to state statistics.

With the sheep went the shearers, many of whom were already nearing retirement age and saw this period of sluggish production as a time to leave the trade. The average age of a shearer is 55, according to the American Sheep Industry Association.

"It became an economic issue," said Scott Greiner, an extension agent and sheep specialist with Virginia Tech. "There wasn't enough demand for someone who was shearing to do it on a full-time basis."

Now those shearers who continue to ply the clippers full time are forced to travel farther and work smaller flocks to a profit. A shearer is typically paid $2.50 to $3 per sheep, Hoolsema said.

Nor does it help that the physical rigors of the job cause some shearers to burn out in their late 30s and early 40s. The work is brutal, requiring the physical exertion akin to playing back-to-back football games for nine hours, said Tammi, who used to shear commercially but quit for health reasons.

Hoolsema, who lives in Michigan, said he's seen at least a dozen full-time shearers leave the trade in the past five years. In that time, he has trained 50 would-be shearers, but only three went on to full-time work in the trade.

His partner, Caryl, an energetic 28-year-old wearing a tank top from a Denver shearing contest, picked up shearing six years ago and now spends 10 months a year on the road. He travels through a half-dozen states and shears sheep by the thousands.

Caryl's foray into the business came after his grandfather, a Michigan shearer, passed away. "The phone kept ringing," he said. "So I picked it up."

But few people his age are likely to be lured into wrestling animals their size or larger, he said, even if the job can be lucrative.

"I wouldn't do it," said Tammi's 23-year-old son, Aaron, majoring in business and engineering at college.

According to the sheep industry association, a shearer can make $20 to $45 an hour depending on skill level.

To help boost the number of shearers out West, some farms import skilled shearers from New Zealand and Australia, but because of new homeland security regulations, those workers now struggle to get seasonal work permits, Hoolsema said.

The shortage comes at a pivotal time for state sheep producers who are seeing demand for lamb meat climb in cities with growing immigrant communities from the Middle East. The value of wool has also gone up slightly, although for most Virginia sheep producers, Greiner said, it still constitutes a small percentage of their revenue, the bulk of which is driven by sales related to lamb production.

For the first time in nearly a decade, the state's industry saw a slight upturn in the number of sheep, bringing the total head count to just over 72,000 in January. For 2005, sheep and lamb products had brought in $3.1 million into Virginia, far below the more than $570 million from broiler chicken sales, but still a considerable income for thousands of state farmers.

"We're finally getting to the point where we can make some money on this," said Jeff Lawson, who in addition to his wool breeds has about 300 head of shear-free hair sheep.

Eyeing a few newborn lambs trotting nervously behind their mothers, Lawson scooped up a hair lamb and brushed his hand over its brown calico coat. "He's like a dog," he said, referring to the lamb's coarse, curly coat.

For Lawson, adding these "low-maintenance" hair breeds to his flock about 10 years ago has helped him trim farm expenses. Even now, he is quick to point out that the value of wool has yet to rebound to a point where it's profitable for Virginia sheep producers.

At roughly $2.40 a fleece, Lawson said, he's barely making enough to cover the cost of the shear.

Still, while hair sheep may have become an economic savior of sorts for farmers battling low wool prices and a lack of available shearers, for others in the business, they may also be contributing to the end of a lifestyle.

"Being a shearer, it doesn't look good for me," Hoolsema said.