About Us
Guy & Angie Johnson
We started Double J Training in 1991, the year we married. For the first 10 years or so, our main focus was on training and selling team roping horses and raising alfalfa hay. In 2002, we sold our alfalfa farm in Nyssa, Oregon, and moved to the John Day valley where Guy took a job as a high school teacher and I continued my work as an adjunct professor teaching online classes. While we continued training horses, we also started a new endeavor -- breeding and training high quality working border collies with our kids under the name Double J Border Collies. Today it's all about the dogs and the only horses we have are used for dog trials. God has overwhelmingly blessed our family; for many years there has been a waiting list for our puppies and we have wonderful relationships with customers from Australia to Alberta and beyond. We enjoy training and competing in sheep and cattle dog trials with our dogs and love to introduce our puppy owners to the world of herding. We treasure strong family and customer relationships and we are intentional about nurturing them. Faith and family are foundational to all we do. It is of prime importance to us to do our very best, “as unto the Lord,” and to rightly reflect Christ’s glory in all things.
In February 2022, we moved to Artesia, New Mexico. We have immediate family in this area and are excited to explore all the southwest has to offer. We will continue our breeding and training from this new location for at least the next few years.
Clay Johnson
Our son Clay started Double J Border Collies with his first border collie, Betsy, in 2005 when he was just seven years old. She grew to become a great cattle dog and Clay's best friend. Betsy had her first litter in 2007, and in the following years God blessed Clay with outstanding puppies and outstanding customers. Clay was a wonderful guardian of the pups' first eight weeks, so they were healthy and well prepared for their new homes. As you can imagine, Clay learned priceless lessons in canine husbandry, entrepreneurship, marketing, genetics, relationship management, and bookkeeping. We are very proud of this young man and all the hard work and love he put into his dogs over the years. Although no longer with Double J Border Collies, Clay is the one who shaped the first 8 years of the business. After graduating with a B.S. degree from EOU, Clay married a sweet young lady from Texas in 2021 and will begin serving in the U.S. Navy in April 2022.
Katie Johnson
When Katie was just a little bitty girl, she would help with socialization of Clay's puppies. Ever so carefully, she'd carry a puppy around the nursing home to share with the residents. At home, she'd play endlessly with the puppies. Katie watched and helped Clay with his litters for a few years, learning the ropes and longing for the day when she could "join the business" and be responsible for a dog of her own. Eventually, Loren Holmes fulfilled Katie's dream with Lea, a pup from his outstanding dogs, Leo and Dazzle. Thus, at the age of 8, Katie managed her first litter and did a simply outstanding job! She continued to be an invaluable part of the business until leaving for college in the fall of 2021. In 2018, Katie founded a non-profit called Calvary Horse Camp to offer foster girls from urban areas a chance to spend a week learning to ride horses and hear the good news of the Gospel. If you get a chance to meet Katie, you will gain a special friend.
Our Breeding Program
A Focus on Performance and Temperament
We breed intelligent, biddable, working border collies with loads of confidence and natural herding instinct. We strive for dogs that have an off-switch, so they are pleasant to live with, but are eager, focused, hard-working partners when it's time to go to work. We want dogs that “live to please” and don’t quit when the going gets tough. Our dogs live up to this standard themselves and are from the best working lines (both sheep and cattle) in the U.S. & Canada.
A Focus on Health
We do everything in our power to maximize the chance that your Double J puppy's body will hold up to his drive. We take health seriously. In addition to hip and elbow certification, there are many genetic tests that have been developed for border collies, such as testing for CEA, IGS, TNS, MDR1 and Early Onset Adult Deafness. Working lines are not exempt from these diseases and puppies should never have to suffer from something that can be easily prevented by breeders. In addition, we BAER test our puppies at 7 weeks to check for congenital deafness.
A Focus on Preserving the Working Border Collie
We believe it is important to protect and preserve the integrity of the border collie as a working breed. We train all of our dogs on sheep and cattle and actively compete in stockdog trials. Our puppies are registered with the ABCA, the premier working line registry in the U.S. Because the AKC recognizes ABCA registered dogs, customers who wish to pursue dual registration may do so easily. With built-in versatility, Double J dogs are well-suited for herding, agility, and search and rescue homes. However, we feel they are not ideal for pet-only homes or for people needing a service dog.
A Focus on a Good Start
We believe the first few months of the puppy's life are critical to developing into a well-adjusted adult dog. We follow Puppy Culture protocols for raising our puppies as this program encapsulates much of what we had already been doing for years, but puts more emphasis and structure on the timing of various activities and exposures. For 12+ years pre-Covid we included weekly visits to nursing homes and assisted living facilities, as this was a blessing to the puppies, the residents, and the volunteers who helped. Since Covid, our socialization efforts have involved inviting more people to the farm, especially kids, and taking many local road trips to explore city and country sounds, sights, and interactions.
A Focus on Relationships
Above all we desire to build and maintain strong relationships with customers. We involve customers with a litter from the very start through a private online group dedicated solely to that litter. There we post pictures and videos of the puppies from birth to eight weeks and littermate owners are able to keep in touch with each other and with us, sharing ideas, highlights of their puppies as they grow, etc. Despite all we do to produce to quality dogs, we know the risk of becoming kennel blind. Therefore we welcome owner feedback on our puppies throughout their lives, we make critical breeding decisions based on this feedback, and a Double J puppy is welcome to come back to us at any time, for any reason, for its entire life. When things don't go as planned, our customers find full support from us, and those relationships inevitably become the strongest because of it.