About Lanz Hollow Farm
Hi there, my name is Amanda Sedor and I’m the breeder behind Lanz Hollow Farm & Kennel. I have spent my whole life farming and raising dogs. As a kid there wasn’t an animal I didn’t rescue or come home with some way or another, be it a sheep left to me as a pet by my beloved grandfather Donald Lanz or an ill homing pigeon that landed in my barn and I nursed back to health and released.
I have always had a big heart for dogs, my parents had many strays and rescues come to their door over the years and each one was unique and loved. It wasn’t until I turned 12 that I got a Shetland Sheepdog affectionately known to some as ‘mini collies’. While I loved this dog for 17 long years she had some idiosyncrasies that I knew I would not want in my future dogs, for one she was too small to go up against natural New England predators at 25lbs, she also had a very heavy cottony coat that would get instantly tangled and was hard to cope with when it came to brambles and ticks, and lastly her bark, it was positively shrill. Maggie May you could say was the dog that set me on the path to find Scotch Collies but somehow the stories of Beatrix Potter and her dog Kep had already done the trick and started the gears moving before I had ever even received Maggie. But to the credit of this little dog and my obsession with all things Beatrix Potter I knew from a young age I wanted to be a dog breeder, at 13 and 14 I carried around my dog encyclopedia to the point where I ruined the dust jacket and binding, if there was a new dog book at the store my eyes were fixed and I’d be begging my mom to buy it. Ever the eternal optimist that my parents might cave and buy me a standard collie I would circle and highlight all the Collie listings in the newspaper and leave them open on the kitchen counter.
Finding Odin
Fast forward, it’s 2016 and I’ve been hanging out in the Scotch Collie group on facebook for little over a year, waiting for my opportunity to find a puppy. I was getting married, moving into my grandmother’s house on the farm and looking for my ‘first dog’ as an independent person. Maggie was still alive but suffering from the dog version of Alzheimer’s and my father couldn’t be parted from her. Never having gone a day in my life without a dog companion you could say I was on the hunt and I had intentions. A surprise litter (an accidental breeding) had taken place in NH and I couldn’t help myself, I called my fiancé (now husband Zac) and we called Carol Lake. Carol was kind enough to hold Odin for us for a couple extra weeks so we could get married and settle into our new home. The day we brought Odin home we were absolutely giddy and that was the start of our great adventure into breeding.
Since then we have outgrown our little house and have been restoring a 1860s farm house that belonged to my grandfather Donald Lanz, an ardent animal lover and sheep farmer for many years it is him we’ve decided to name the farm after. Even though Odin is the first dog we purchased both him and his mother Gwynen are the foundation of our breeding program. I was able to purchase Gwynen two years after purchasing Odin when she turned 3 years old. Since then she has had two beautiful litters with us and we have kept one female from each, Oona (Lanz Hollow Britannia) and Eden (Lanz Hollow Garden in Galloway). We’ve also kept a daughter of Odin and Marigold (Widdershin’s Ghost Dog), Nimuë (Lanz Hollow in the Mists of Avalon). Marigold retired in 2020 after blessing us with 2 good sized litters of 8 & 9. This year Freyja (Romany’s Utopia) will also be retiring after 4 beautiful litters. Freyja has contributed nicely to the scotch collie gene pool; several of her children are intact with other breeders along the east coast and in guardian homes associated with our kennel. In early 2020 we found Nessa (Lanz Hollow Little Loch Ness) who is a sheltie/collie mix whom we will be using to increase the genetic diversity (coi) in our line, potentially bring down the size of future dogs ever so slightly as many inquiries have asked for this feature, and clean up carrier genes in our lines.