Sheep on 1/2 acre?

Niele da Kine

Loving the herd life
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Moku Nui Hawaii
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This is Cypress and Flower, they're two Clun Forest wool sheep.

They have a quarter acre of grass that's pretty much between six and nine feet tall, plus ti leaves and other assorted vegetation. They've been there since early August and so far they've made trails around the perimeter and a couple trails through the center. They've learned to jump up on the grass to bring the tops down within reach, but there's still a lot of grass in there. As they eat the tall stuff, it sprouts back and they like the sprouts better than the tall stuff so at some point there may reach a balance where enough tall grass has been eaten down that there's enough sprouting grass that they don't need to knock any more tall stuff down. In three months, they've cleared trails and you can tell they've been in the pasture, but it's nowhere near pasture like yet. I think it's clearing slow enough though that once they do get it into pasture it may support them without much additional feed. The neighbors have a different type of grass, a lot of perennial peanut and some shorter grasses, not much of the Guinea/cane/elephant/Reznor grasses that we have. They have two hair sheep which are about a third the size of the two here and their sheep don't seem to be clearing off their pasture much at all. But, it's only been three months for them to have sheep as well so we will see what happens six months to a year from now.

Should they graze their pasture down to bare dirt, I have a friend with five acres of tall grass and she can always use more sheep but we're hoping to keep them here to keep the back yard into something less like a jungle.
 
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