What’s in a Breed?
All breeds of sheep bear a purpose. All breeds fit a part of a larger production being directed and adapted by shepherds everywhere. Institutions categorize sheep breeds in different ways, but most new shepherds learn meat, wool, and dairy to start. Somewhere in there is a painfully grey area sucking in the eager interest of many an unknowing newbie looking for the perfect sheep. This is the commonly used dual-purpose category. It’s true that most breeds produce usable wool, and all sheep produce meat but the hyped up “they can do it all” touted by almost every breed can be horribly confusing when searching for your first flock.
I prefer to talk in terms of maternal and terminal breeds for a corrected comprehension of both the strengths and weaknesses breeds possess. These two labels are not all-inclusive but includes most breeds in this country and makes a great starting point. Before moving past that starting point, we do need to establish some basic concepts of crossbreeding. Most farm flocks start off with purebred sheep for simplicity’s sake. However, crossbred sheep have a superior advantage in terms of hardiness and productivity thanks to the natural phenomenon we call hybrid vigor. Most sheep producers growing lambs for meat take advantage of hybrid vigor in their flocks through one of several crossbreeding systems. I’ll use my favorite, a three-way terminal crossing program, as an example.
Once your flock goals are set and climactic conditions understood, you’ll want to pick two complimentary maternal breeds and cross them together. For this scenario, let’s say Border Leicesters and Finns (wink, wink). Finns add greater prolificacy through higher lambing percentages and stronger reproductive characteristics while the Border Leicesters bring a more desirable mature size and feed efficiency. We’ll keep all of the ewe lambs born from this cross, raise them up, and you have yourself a custom made, hybrid vigor-ed, ewe flock! The expeditious alternative is to purchase in a crossbred ewe flock bred by someone else. Either way, the next step is to pick a terminal breed for their mate. Let’s go with Colin’s favorite, the Suffolk. Now we breed our vigorous crossbred ewes to a gentleman of a breed exceling in carcass quality and growth rates. He brings the meat, literally. Your maternal breed ewes are designed to be excellent mothers so when lambing comes around you have all the advantages of easy lambing, extra milky, maternally strong, hardy sheep raising your lambs. Those lambs possess half of the traits of Mr. Meaty Suffolk. Starting to understand? In this system you benefit from the strengths of all the breeds involved while they simultaneously compensate for each other’s weaknesses. This system is set up so all of those Suffolk x Border Leicester x Finn lambs are raised for meat and none are retained in the flock. To raise up replacement ewe lambs, you’d pull out the top tier brood ewes, what we call the nucleus flock, for a separate breeding group once every few years and mate them to another maternal breed ram to maintain the maternal strengths. The ewe lambs from this mating would be retained and added to your ewe flock when you’re looking to retire older ewes or increase flock size.
To summarize, maternal breeds make good mamas. Terminal breeds make good sires for meaty lambs in a terminal market. You’ll also hear them called ewe breeds and ram breeds, respectively. There’s a number of other crossing strategies that juggle different breeds in different ways all with the goal of finding sheep who complement each other and creating hybrid vigor. Dual-purpose breeds do get their designation but not because they do everything perfectly on their own. These breeds earn the title because they can work as either maternal or terminal sheep in a crossbred system. To make crossbreeding programs work, we do need purebred flocks to maintain the qualities of each breed. That is to say, there’s a place for purebred sheep and this is usually the hardest bit to grasp in the grand scheme of it all . Raising purebred sheep means you will also be producing meat and wool but if you’re marketing any breeding stock to other shepherds, these should be considered a by-product of the genetic value you’re animals can provide.
All other breeds fall into the specialty category, those that won’t fit well in a production setting outside of their native land. Here’s where your rare and heritage breeds like Shetlands, Karakuls, and Jacob go. Hair sheep deserve mention too and are obviously of the meat variety, but you never want to cross them with wool sheep so don’t ask me where they fit. Stick them in the corner by themselves?
The essence of this alternative categorization is compromise. Despite what all of our breed associations tell us, no sheep is perfect. I mentioned strengths and weaknesses already and now I want to emphasize weaknesses even more. Every single breed has them. If we allow for truly objective analysis, a sheep’s qualities can be ranked with only one trait taking the first slot and everything else they do fits in somewhere else down the list. Therefore, another breed will always come in doing your breed’s second ranked trait a little bit better. Some breeds embody balance better than others, but they all still have weaknesses. I happily run the risk of sounding like a broken record because this is something we seedstock producers don’t talk about nearly enough. I’m witness every year to a number of clients who think they’ve scored the perfect breed based on extensive internet searches and conversations with breeders only to bring their new sheep home and be blindsided but an unexpected issue somewhere, sometime.
Try to hear this next bit with less of a pessimistic tone than it wants. With purebred sheep you have to pick the disadvantages you’re willing to deal with and deal with them. It’s possible to find a breed whose flaws don’t bother you! But don’t gloss over them when talking to the next potential shepherd exploring that breed. That is a great strategy to create frustrated opponents to your breed. I know because I shear for these folks too. Next month I’ll lay out what the breeds at Yankee Rock bring to the table, in full. All our farms are unique. Our goals are individual, whether homesteading or lambing a few hundred ewes in an accelerated program. Variety is plentiful amongst the ovine species and there is surely something for all of us.
Cheers,