Bad hair days!

Last week I talked about getting a new ram for our Border Leicester ewes. We also had to make a change of rams for our Katahdins. Our meat sheep are a breed that sheds instead of being sheared, which is a great cost cutting advantage when you have a lot of sheep. This limits us to selecting another hair breed as a ram. We wanted to try to get a ram that would produce larger bodied offspring, so we chose a Dorper ram.

Dorpers are also hair sheep, but they don’t shed quite as easily as Katahdins, especially in their first year. The great thing about them is that they have short legs, but much larger bodies than our sheep. I did a lot of research on the genetics of the cross. If we use a Dorper for just two years, we can hopefully get bigger bodies, but retain the shedding qualities of the ewes.

Good things come when you have many sheep friends. We went in with Redbrooke Ranch to get a ram that we can share for a couple of years. The ram we found came from our herding friend in Georgia who has Dorpers. There you have it, the makings of a new and exciting breeding experiment. We’ll see how it turns out.