Cross breeding sheep for meat?

Around here the most common sheep breed for meat is Sufflock. That's all we have ever raised so I don't know what's better!

I let her know what you all said. She is going to keep her eye out for Dorper in her area. Her girls are acting in heat, she's hoping that she can find one soon.

G'day Bossroo,that is such 'sound advice" for that lady.The Corriedale is a dual purpose breed down here.The wool is well suited to hand-spinners,we used to breed naturally colored ones years ago.If the wool was the 'go',you could use a pure Corrie to increase ewe numbers and mate the progeny to a meat ram.What do you think Bossroo? With 40 acres she should be able to manage a nice small flock....T.O.R.

Ditto on the Dorper or Suffolk suggestions. We bred pure suffolk, and suffolk/polypay as well as one of our rams being Suffolk with 1/8 hampshire. I will say if you go with a dorper vs suffolk, dorper are overall smaller in size by 20-130lbs. Dorper and Rambouillet are all small breed sheep while New Hampshire and Suffolk are large breed sheep. If your friend is wanting market lambs corridale is a slow growth sheep for market lambs, this is the expected growth rate for several breeds used for meat typically.

Fastest to slowest growth
To reach 110lbs
Min. Market weight typically
is 100lbs in the US

122-138 days - Suffolk
New Hampshire

138-157 days - Dorper
Dorset
Columbia
Oxford
Shropshire
Texel

157-183 days Corridale
Polypay
Rambouillet
Southdown
Targhee

Your friend has quite a bit of research to do and just taking whatever breeds we suggest may not be the right choice for them.

Besides size of the adult sheep, you have to look at birth size/weight, growth rate, wool or hair, maintenance requirements, special needs, hardiness to your climate, ability to thrive on your land type, and if there is a profit concern you need to look at how well those (specific cross) market lambs sell and at what price.

There are also a few bonus things as well such as the Corridale are 100% naturally polled does your friend want to stay with polled for the benefits of no horn burning and no need to buy a burning iron? Rambouillet and Dorset can be polled or horned. Some breeds are more likely to throw twins/triplets then others, they may or may not require bottle feeding the extra.

Dorper are hair sheep mostly and usually come naturally polled good points but if you live in a cold climate make sure they can handle your weather with the shelter provided, you may need to coat them, i would assume most places in the US they would be fine but if your friend lives in Canada, or someplace that gets really really cold it might be a problem.

Also consider most dorper crosses to wool sheep will not produce shedding sheep on the first cross but will produce wooled sheep with a fairly large amount of hair in the fleece, the second cross making them 3/4 dorper will mostly shed but again not all, on the third cross all offspring should shed. Since Corridale come from Merino sheep i would think the gene to stay wooled would be fairly strong in them but thats only speculation.

One last thing.. Dorper's are primarily raised for mutton. If they want to do market lambs with hair sheep try Katahdin perhaps, they usually have twins, come in lots of colors, resistant to parasites and are also naturally polled as well as being a mid-size sheep.

EDIT: opps sister not friend lol.

T.O.R. --- The Corriedale is a great dual purpose production sheep, however for the small operation , due to today's HIGH COST of shearing the sheep, wool is a money loosing proposition. Here and there, a few sell wool at a high enough price to break even if they can supply it to hand spinners willing to pay the price over and above what they can buy yarn imported from Australia. The trend here for the best chance to make a profit is the hair sheep especially the Dorper for meat and their hide for high quality leather.

Bossroo said:

T.O.R. --- The Corriedale is a great dual purpose production sheep, however for the small operation , due to today's HIGH COST of shearing the sheep, wool is a money loosing proposition. Here and there, a few sell wool at a high enough price to break even if they can supply it to hand spinners willing to pay the price over and above what they can buy yarn imported from Australia. The trend here for the best chance to make a profit is the hair sheep especially the Dorper for meat and their hide for high quality leather.

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Definately agree....the wool market here is pretty much non-existant unless you can do value added products. I know some people make the fleece into batts and make pillows or comforters out of it which they sell for about $600 for a King size blanket but i have no idea how many fleece it takes to make say one king size comforter. I know there are some neiche breeds they sell the wool for 12-29/lb mostly the mils will offer $3/lb when they are buying but they dont buy often. As far as i know it is not a problem limited to sheep, it is all fiber animals.

She is looking just for meat, not looking for wool profit. She got the girls for a deal. The people didn't want to deal with a ram on their property, so sold the girls off instead. They got the the sheep & goats from a friend who got deployed and sold them cheap to them. To give them a good home. Anyways that's why she got them. They're fully tested and everything. We were raised on lamb. Which we LOVE. However trying to find it in at a store is hard enough. Raising and butchering would be strictly for meat for her family and if we wanted to go in on the lambs feed, meat for the rest of the family. There is someone who has Katahdin sheep near her. Just looking for a good growing, preferably hair sheep where she only needs to sheer her girls.

misfitmorgan said:

Definately agree....the wool market here is pretty much non-existant unless you can do value added products. I know some people make the fleece into batts and make pillows or comforters out of it which they sell for about $600 for a King size blanket but i have no idea how many fleece it takes to make say one king size comforter. I know there are some neiche breeds they sell the wool for 12-29/lb mostly the mils will offer $3/lb when they are buying but they dont buy often. As far as i know it is not a problem limited to sheep, it is all fiber animals.

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I agree that the value problem of wool value is not limited to sheep. Other fiber animals are experiencing similar issues. The "progressives " are going around this country espousing the $15/ hr. minimum wage. If that is so then many small farmers will go out of business. In anticipation of this, there is an Alpaca breeder ( 5 miles from our house ) that owns about 100 head and sells them Nationaly as well as Internationaly. I visited them a couple months ago at their annual open house and they said that they are now agressively selling off their herd at way below last years prices as they have had losses in selling the Alpaca fiber plus the rise in feed and labor costs and foresee it getting much worse. The writing is on the wall, how many of the small farmers will head the warning before they loose their shirts ?

We shear our own so there is no high cost per say just some time...but then what to do with the fleece....most mills refuse to buy raw fleeces anymore. We can pay to have it processed but it is very expensive, to have it washed and thats it is $5.25/lb. The mill does offer everything from wash to finished yarn or other products with your wool but none of it is cost effective. Such as socks, you must send in enough wool for a 1-2 dozen pairs of socks min. depending on style. The socks are 100lbs or more of raw fiber...10.70-14.95 per pair and take 1 year to make. So if you want wool socks from your own sheep and cant knit this option would cost min $129 plus shipping you 100lbs of fleece to them and them shipping back your socks. Less then 100lbs of fleece and the price per pair goes up in tiers the most costly being 30-49lbs 12.70-17.95/pair. If you want knee-high its a dollar more per pair. Quite honestly for a dozen pairs of well made high quality wool socks it is reasonably since they are knit by hand but most people will not want to pay a high price and wait a year to see a return on it. You can get wool washed and processed into different types of batts or roving 8.55/lb. So yeah i can see how this would be handy for people with smaller flocks who want to do something with their fleece or sell it at a farmers market or locally in a shop or etsy etc. Even the low grade wool made into roving seems to be selling for $15+ per lb.

Well that is very informative. I have this mental picture of me having fiber sheep, shearing, spinning and knitting garments. But reality is that I am busting butt to get infrastructure done and still have a long way to go. When would I have time for all that? Still dreaming....