Sheep tales

I’m still working on getting into the habit of

blogging, as evidenced by the long break since my last. So I’ve decided to give myself a goal of writing an intro and update on each kind of livestock we keep, starting with our sheep. It’s taken a few years to get to where we are now with them so I’ll start at the beginning.

Several years ago we were looking into sheep breeds. It was important to us that they be easy keepers and suited to a small homestead. So, of course, we started it search into heritage breeds at the Livestock Conservancy (https://livestockconservancy.org). We were waffling between Romeldales and Jacobs being the best choice for us when it seemed like fate intervened. I was scrolling on Craigslist in the farm section, as you do, when I saw an ad for fairly local Jocobs sheep. We jumped in and picked up an unrelated trio. We also picked up some mixed breed hair sheep which we intended to raise up for processing.

The Jacobs were flighty, but Ken assured me his years raising 4h sheep had prepared him for just that situation. What he didn’t take into account is that this was a more primitive breed than he was use to and we never got them fully tamed down. Pudding, the ram, was the most friendly of the group and he was the driving force between all our interactions. This was before we invested in livestock guardians and we unfortunately lost him to injuries sustained defending the herd from dogs. With him gone they became even more aloof and flighty.

The breeder we got them from was sold out of unrelated rams and the next closest breeder we could find was an 8hr drive away and was similarly sold out for the year. We didn’t want to miss out on lambs for processing the next year so we decided to keep the hair sheep ram lamb as a sire for that year and look for a Jacobs ram the next spring. We ended up keeping a few of the hair sheep ewe lambs as well hoping for a decent haul of lambs.

Every one of our ewes lambed that next year but every one lambed a singleton. And catching them to band the boys was an adventure. After two years of the same we decided we needed a change and back to the drawing board we went.

That’s when we came across Romanov sheep. The more we looked into them the more we liked what we heard. They are a hardy breed well suited to both harsh winters and hot summers but it was their reproductive ability that really caught our attention. We’ll touch more on that in the next post.

Till next time,

Kim