Long Game

All the showing leading right into breeding for spring lambs plus fall lambers’ due dates approaching…it’s an exciting time for this shepherd.  Breeding sheep is more than finding a good ram, breeding him to your ewes for two years, then finding another good ram once his daughters are old enough.  At least for us, every breeding decision is about two years behind where our thoughts are concentrated but not because we’ll be on the market for another stud ram necessarily.  You see, the trading in new rams every two years model has a major flaw when raising maternal breeds.  A ram’s impact can be tremendous to your flock and the entire breed, so it doesn’t seem quite right to move him along so soon but especially because his influence isn’t that immediate.  To breed sheep is a lengthy commitment with guaranteed failures and tedious delays between actions and observable results.  The veracity of such a statement is worth exploring.

            The Border Leicesters and Finns making up our flock are maternal breeds.  A maternal breed of sheep is one that excels reproductively, demonstrates longevity, and often produces saleable wool in commercial markets.  Other examples include Polypays, Coopworths, and in some cases Dorsets, Columbias, and Targhees.  Being a maternal breed means we, as breeders, are focused on females.  Yes, as seedstock producers we also raise and sell registered breeding rams but their purpose is to go on and make daughters.  When we go out to purchase a new ram, we always want to look at the prospect’s mother.  Maternal breeds focus on females.  Therefore, you don’t know a ram’s worth until his daughters are lambing.  That day comes sooner for our Finns than the Leicesters but either way there’s a serious lag between selection and the true measure of his impact.

            To better explain why we approach maternal breeds the way we do, let’s look at the opposite side of the coin.  Terminal breeds, also known as “ram” breeds, consist of many sheep you probably already know as meat breeds.  Common terminal breeds include Suffolks, Hampshires, and Texels.  The concentrated strength of terminal breeds is in growth and carcass quality.  Breeders of terminal breeds are engaged in the production of rams to go out and make terminal lambs, i.e. for meat.  That’s where we get much of the overlapping of meat breeds and terminal breeds.  Makes sense, right?  So, a terminal breed ram’s impact can be evaluated after one set of his offspring are raised to market weight.  Notice how all this compliments the strategy of raising maternal breeds?  That’s by design.  In truly productive sheep farming, a producer can utilize both maternal breeds (making up their ewe flock) and terminal breeds (with rams to breed their ewe flock and make growthy market lambs) and benefit from the strengths of each, producing marketable wool on sturdy sheep (from the ewe flock) and high-quality meat (from the cross-bred lambs).  I know I’ve explained this concept before, but it can be a hard one to wrap your head around.  This time it’s to make the case for linebreeding.

            After the tiny slimy lambs hit the ground, I’m watching and weighing them all through the first year to make my first round of judgements.  Decisions about who to keep are based first on structural soundness, wool quality, and growth traits. (Yes, even though they’re a maternal breed we can still look at those qualities associated with terminal breeds.  They’ll never perform as well as a terminal breed in those categories, but we still want good growing sheep.)  All of that’s in mind when we make breeding groups with maiden ewes but there’s still a blank spot on their record next to the most important attributes:  delivering, tending to, and feeding lambs. 

            A ram just can’t show me his genetic potential for lactation and lamb rearing due to hopefully obvious reasons.  We make assumptions based on his mother and hold our breath waiting on his daughters.  There are ways to supplement our guess work, though.  Collecting and analyzing data through the National Sheep Improvement Program results in values assigned to all our sheep, ewes and rams.  Values based on mothers and mothers’ sisters and the overall breed averages come together to give us a little better insight into what we’re typically waiting two years to find out.  Still, data will never entirely replace the real live results.  Even the data from NSIP takes time to build up for maternal breeds because it takes several generations of data to generate enough information to build up some amount of accuracy. 

            And so we wait.  This whole essay is to tell you breeding sheep takes patience.  With the matings taking place right now on our farm I’m already thinking about potential daughters to get bred in two years’ time.  What strengths I’m hoping their sire will pass on and what weaknesses I should anticipate them to inherit.  What are the boys at work today going to bring our program next year with their yearling offspring and the year after?  We’re never not thinking about what’s next, even with a one to two year wait for reproductive maturation, forty-day breeding season, and five-month gestation wait time.  Idle minds are no good anyways. 

            There’s one other trick. Linebreeding is a word I’ve noticed gets far different reactions from different sectors of the sheep-raising communities I engage with. The newer, small-scale shepherds shy away, associate it with inbreeding. You can’t mate relatives together, right? Talking to shepherds with more experience, more intentional breeding programs and I find it’s the key to a successful breeding program. Tightening up lines, as we say, concentrates specific sheep’s influence on their progeny. We’re still waiting on our ewes to lamb in order to prove their worth as maternal sheep but doing it with linebreeding paints a more honest picture of their genetic offerings. All of our sheep have recessive traits we don’t know about. By overlapping ancestors strategically, we can bring those to the surface. The next and very critical step in that is to cull. You absolutely will see negative traits but culling should be a part of you breeding program anyways, it’s extra important when it comes to linebreeding. I can’t say too much on this subject. We’re really only beginning to dip our toes into the water on it and in the very early stages of implementing it within our flock.

Linebreeding or NSIP enrollement, or plain old simple sheep raising - doesn’t matter how you go about it. If you’re in for real, you have to play the long game.

Chi, the ram pictured up front, is a home-bred ram slated to see a whole lot of another Finn ram’s daughters this spring for fall 2023 lambing. Lewis, the sire of the white ewe pictured here has been our lead Finn stud for five seasons now. We’re not in a rush to get rid of him but have been contemplating the next piece needed for his daughters joining the flock. Chi’s the one we’re settled on.