Best Sheep Breeds for Homesteaders

In many temperate climates, sheep offer the distinct advantage of reaching slaughter weight before the grass goes dormant in winter, which means you can harvest or sell the year’s lamb crop without having to buy hay for feed. This timing often coincides with the natural shedding of a sheep’s winter coat in wool breeds. A 100-pound lamb will yield about 35 pounds of meat for your freezer — much easier to store than a side of beef.

Sheep have a reputation for being more labor-intensive than cattle. Some farmers will tell you that even the best sheep breeds need to be wormed frequently, that you must trim their hooves, that they need help lambing, and that their tails must be docked. However, many successful sheep farmers know that none of those processes are necessary if you choose your breed and breeder prudently, and if you manage your flock to be self-sufficient in your specific conditions.

And if you raise a “hair sheep” breed, such as our Katahdin-Mouflon crosses, you won’t even need to shear them. Haired sheep are ideal for meat-focused flocks, especially where wool production is not a priority.

Select the Best Sheep Breeds to Meet Your Needs

Choosing the best sheep breed for your homestead can be challenging. The United Nations has documented more than 1,000 sheep breeds worldwide, with several hundred of them in North America. This wide range of options includes both traditional and modern breed types, from horned breeds to wool-focused lines. Multipurpose breeds are a good bet, depending on what you’re looking for. The following types of sheep are reliable meat producers, and some can provide you with additional products.

Sans wool. If you have a taste for lamb but don’t want wool, then a “hair sheep” — a breed that sheds its coat naturally in spring — is a practical choice. Katahdins and Dorpers are popular hair-sheep breeds. For hardier sheep that take well to domestication, try Mouflon or Barbados Blackbelly. Hair sheep are particularly useful in hot climates or when raising sheep solely for meat.

Watching a Mouflon ram patrolling your pasture will provide a window back in time: Historians believe the Mouflon is descended from the first domesticated sheep, tamed in Europe and the Middle East thousands of years ago. Breeders have crossed Mouflon with domestic sheep to create several varieties known for their impressive horns.

Horned breeds like Mouflon contribute genetic diversity to modern flocks and may improve traits such as parasite resistance or adaptability. Although horns serve as protective equipment on wild sheep, they can actually make your domestic flock easier to handle. The safest and easiest w

ay to move a recalcitrant ram is to grab him by the horns.

Most horned sheep will not produce the large, meaty carcasses of the best meat-sheep breeds. However, if you plan to sell your animals on the hoof or harvest them for your own use, you might just as soon raise two 100-pound rams as one 200-pound ram.

With wool. If you want to harvest wool as well as meat, you should check out traditional wool breeds that have been bred to produce large volumes of fine, relatively short fibers. Merino and Rambouillet are characteristic fine-wool producers.

Merino sheep, in particular, are known for their high wool production and ultra-soft fibers prized by the textile industry. Traditional wool breeds that produce less hair with longer fibers that are suitable for hand-spinning include Shetlands, Leicesters and Romneys.

Plus milk. Dairy sheep have been gaining popularity recently with the growth in consumer markets for artisanal cheeses. Friesian and Lacaune sheep are popular dairy breeds, but many other breeds can be trained to serve as dairy sheep while continuing to produce meat and wool. The butterfat content of sheep milk makes it particularly desirable for cheese-making, with some domestic animals producing surprisingly rich yields.

Breeders. If you intend to raise your animals exclusively on grass, they’ll have a big advantage if they’ve been grazing locally and are conditioned to your area. So, try to find a competent breeder near your home or in a climate similar to yours.

Sheep adapted to your microclimate may exhibit better natural health and higher effective population size within your breeding pool. If you discover a sheep breed that’s been raised nearby, you’ll have ready access to new breeding stock when you need it, plus a potential market for breeding stock from your own herd.

Notable Sheep Breeds by Purpose

Wool Breeds

• Merino: Renowned for ultra-fine, high-quality wool; ideal for premium textiles.
• Rambouillet: Dual-purpose breed with fine wool and good meat yield; adaptable to various climates.
• Shetland: Produces soft, fine wool in various natural colors; small and hardy.
• Leicester Longwool: Yields long, lustrous wool; medium to large size.
• Romney: Dual-purpose breed; provides heavy fleece and quality meat. These wool-producing breeds often develop a thick winter coat essential for surviving colder climates and supporting consistent wool production.

Meat Breeds

• Dorper: Fast-growing with excellent carcass quality; thrives in arid climates.
• Katahdin: Hair sheep breed; low maintenance and adaptable to various environments.
• Barbados Blackbelly: Hardy and prolific; suitable for tropical climates.
• Mouflon: Wild ancestor of domestic sheep; not commonly used in farming but valuable in conservation or specialty herds. Many of these breeds of sheep are selected for meat traits rather than wool or milk, reflecting different priorities in modern breed selection.

Dairy Breeds

• East Friesian: High milk production; requires attentive management.
• Lacaune: Primary breed for Roquefort cheese; hardy and adaptable. Dairy sheep typically produce milk with higher butterfat content than dairy cows, making them ideal for cheesemaking.

Grazing Sheep: Best Practices

If you intend to grass-feed and grass-finish your sheep on natural pasture, experienced ranchers will recommend that you bring a small flock to your property in the early part of the growing season to give them time to acclimate before they have to scrounge for sustenance in winter or drought conditions.

As they become accustomed to their environment, sheep can be resourceful grazers, able to acquire nutrition from a varied menu. Case in point: On our property, a drought created an outbreak of ragweed in a relatively high, dry pasture, and our flock devoured the ragweed before they went to work on the grass.

In many parts of the world, sheep and goats are flocked together — an ideal arrangement because their dietary needs are so distinct. Goats are browsers that need pastures with plenty of trees, shrubs or other woody plants. Sheep, although versatile, are primarily grazers that prefer grass.

The strong flocking instinct of sheep complements the independence of goats when forming diverse, sustainable herds. A balanced flock of sheep and goats can efficiently maintain a diverse pasture of grass, forbs and shrubs, and they can graze on steep, rocky ground not suited to crops.

Livestock Health Care for Sheep

Authoritative books prescribe an exhaustive regimen of veterinary rituals to achieve perfect livestock health care. We’ve found that we can breed sheep to be hardy and independent, and we can manage our pastures to avoid almost every serious veterinary problem.

Our local geographic conditions select individuals, generation by generation, to thrive on our prairie in eastern Kansas. And we choose the members of each generation that fit best with our lifestyle and agricultural techniques. (This approach improves the effective population size of our flock by favoring naturally healthy domestic animals.) (For more on how we developed our herd, see Sheep Breeding: Localize Your Livestock.)

We recommend taking a hands-off approach, and figure that if we breed carefully and maintain clean, healthy pastures, we’ll generally have healthy animals. We rotate our sheep and goats with a small herd of cows and don’t overgraze, and we’ve never needed to worm any of our animals. Never. Most parasites that afflict sheep and goats are harmless to cattle — and vice versa.

We’ve always chosen breeding stock from flocks t hat were seldom wormed, if ever. If you regularly worm your flock, you’ll breed animals with decreasing natural resistance to parasites. The practice itself contributes to the problem. Overmanaging wool-producing or horned breeds may lead to increased intervention over time unless hardy genetics are prioritized.

With hardy breeds like ours, if you systematically trim hooves and don’t cull animals whose hooves need to be trimmed, then you’ll breed animals that require trimming. And so on.

Our young rams are ready to be weaned — or, rather, their mothers are happy to wean them — at about 4 months of age, before they’re mature enough to breed. Years ago, we began separating the young rams at that age, which eliminates the need to castrate them. They graze for another two months, and we harvest them at about 6 months old.

They eat only fresh grass — no grain and no dried forage. This natural diet supports higher butterfat content in milk-producing ewes and better flavor in meat-producing breeds. Their meat is much richer in omega-3 fatty acids than ground beef is (see “How Healthy Is Grass-Fed Lamb?” below).

We’ve read that it’s necessary to dock sheep tails of certain breeds in some regions, but we’ve never docked a tail and have never had a tail-related health issue.

The most difficult time to remain hands-off is during lambing. When we started in the sheep business 12 years ago, we committed ourselves to nonintervention. We have day jobs, so spending four weeks a year watching the flock while the lambs are being delivered would be difficult for us. Plus, it just didn’t seem like good management. We’ve never helped a ewe deliver a lamb, and we’ve never bottle-fed a lamb.

In our original flock of Katahdin ewes, our lamb mortality rates were 10 to 20 percent for the first few years, which seemed OK until I looked at studies of commercial flocks that had mortality rates of more than 30 percent. Then, our rates seemed excellent.

A few years later, we began crossbreeding with bighorn Mouflon-cross rams, and the resulting lambs were suddenly much more active and mobile. The Mouflon-cross lambs are usually able to run by the time they’re 3 or 4 hours old, while our Katahdin lambs can take several days to get their legs. Our mortality rates went down. This improvement could be related to the robust genetics retained from horned breeds like Mouflon.

Aside from predator issues, our lamb mortality rates are now usually less than 10 percent. We have friends in the sheep business who assist in more than half their flocks’ births and experience higher lamb mortality rates. Yet, we’ve never helped a ewe, period.

The only way we’ve found to explain this is to speculate that, as prey animals, the last thing our ewes want during the birthing process is a large predator (us) hovering over them and touching them. We’ve come to believe that the majority of lambing problems result from the intervention of people who believe they’re helping.

Because we don’t vaccinate our animals, we’re careful to introduce new stock only from well-managed flocks. We’ve never had a major health problem, but we remain vigilant.

How to Guard Grazing Sheep

Grazing sheep are essentially defenseless against predators. Coyotes, bobcats, foxes, domestic dogs and even the occasional mountain lion live in our region. We first protected our flocks with donkeys and mules, which was effective for many years.

But a couple of years ago, our local coyotes apparently adopted a new technique, and our predation losses soared from two or three animals per season to 40 percent of the lamb crop in just one year. Enter the livestock guardian dog.

We’d been reluctant to use dogs to guard the flock, believing that the care and feeding of more dogs would be a hassle. Desperate after our losses and willing to try anything, we bought Sam, an experienced Great Pyrenees guardian dog.

From the first day we walked the fence lines with Sam, he knew his territory and guarded it vigilantly. For two weeks, he and the coyote pack argued over the territory. We could hear them exchanging insults through the night. In his first lambing season, Sam allowed not a single loss to a predator.

If a livestock guardian dog isn’t a practical option for you, and you live anywhere dogs and coyotes live — which is, of course, almost everywhere — then you’ll most likely have predator issues. We know people whose donkeys, alpacas and llamas seem to do the job. Others discourage predators with electric fencing.

In our experience, the big dogs that have been bred for centuries to protect sheep have been a godsend, and the easiest animal-husbandry implementation we’ve ever undertaken. (These dogs often pick up on common signals of flock distress and act accordingly, making them uniquely attuned protectors of domestic animals.)

(See Livestock Guardian Dogs Protect a Kansas Flock.)

Market Your Product

When you buy your first sheep, you’ll need to make fundamental decisions about which products you wish to harvest from them. What are you going to do with any extra meat, milk and wool your animals produce? A survey of local advertising for lambs, meat and breeding stock can give you a good idea of the size of your local market and prices.

Also, consider marketing your products online through such national networks as Local Harvest, Eatwild and Agrilicious.

Most small-scale producers find it simplest to sell live animals, and to offer delivery to a local slaughterhouse of the buyer’s choice. In many locales, customers may ask whether the farmer can provide them with a place to perform the slaughter, which is traditional in some cultures.

If local laws allow, and if the customer is a competent butcher, the arrangement can be a practical and efficient way of selling lambs. However, some jurisdictions outlaw the outdoor slaughter of animals, and an inexperienced butcher could hurt animals unnecessarily and may leave a mess, so weigh this option carefully.

The key to enjoying all of your animals is, of course, to create a management system that doesn’t require you to worry about them constantly. Our system has just a few components: livestock bred to be hardy and self-reliant, competent guardian animals, and fences in good repair.

And we do, indeed, enjoy our animals.

Lamb Meat Nutritional Facts: Grass-Fed Is Great

If you produce 100 percent grass-fed lamb, you’ll deliver some of the healthiest and most sustainable red meat in the world to your family and customers.

In New Zealand, most lambs are 100 percent grass-fed, and it shows in their meat’s fatty acid profile, which has 35 percent more beneficial omega-3s and 43 percent fewer inflammatory omega-6s than domestic feedlot-raised lamb. (See Omega-3s and More: The Importance of Fat in a Healthy Diet for more on omega fatty acids’ role in our diets.)

In the United States, Minnesota farmer Janet McNally finished her flock on an experimental pasture that included kale, turnips, radishes, ryegrass, hairy vetch and red clover. McNally’s lamb had almost four times more anti-inflammatory omega-3s than domestic industrial lamb, and 27 times more than industrial ground beef! Read her full report, Land salmon? Grassfed lamb’s Omega-3s shine.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture claims that the levels of undesirable omega-6 fatty acids in domestic lamb are two times higher than in industrial ground beef. These numbers seemed odd, until we discovered that many U.S. lambs are fed an unnatural diet of grain in feedlots, just like most other domestic livestock.

We also learned that feedlot lambs are susceptible to a serious common condition known as “Overeating Disease,” often triggered by the feedlots’ high grain diet. It seems like “Wrong Feeding Practices” would be a more appropriate name for what producers are doing to these animals, and how their decisions are affecting lamb meat’s nutritional qualities.

According to numerous extension fact sheets, the first sign of this disease is that the lambs die. As with so many other problems in the industrial food system, work-arounds, such as vaccines and antibiotics, mask the problem without addressing its root cause.

Sheep raised for meat, wool, or milk all benefit from proper nutrition, though breeds of sheep vary in their nutrient conversion efficiency. Whether you’re focused on wool production or maximizing butterfat content in dairy sheep, pasture management and feed diversity play critical roles.

Lesson learned: Raise your own pastured animals or buy only meat labeled “100 percent grass-fed.”

— Cheryl Long

FAQ: How to Raise Sheep

• What should I feed sheep?
  Sheep mainly eat grass, hay, and forage. Supplement with a salt/mineral block formulated for sheep. Avoid feeding copper-rich feeds, as it can be toxic to them.
• Can I keep just one sheep?
  No, sheep are highly social herd animals and do poorly in isolation. Keep at least two or more to maintain their mental health and reduce stress. The flocking instinct is a strong behavioral trait in most breeds of sheep.
• How do I manage breeding?
  Breeding is typically done with one ram for 25-50 ewes. Sheep have a 5-month gestation period. Plan for extra care during lambing season. Be aware that some horned breeds may require extra space during mating.
• Can sheep coexist with other livestock?
  Yes, but avoid housing them with animals that require copper supplements (like goats), and monitor for bullying or disease transmission. Sheep are among the most adaptable domestic animals when paired properly.

Bryan Welch and his wife, Carolyn, have supervised a dozen lambing seasons on their Kansas ranch with lots of help from their Great Pyrenees security force. Welch is CEO of B The Change Media and the author of Beautiful and Abundant: Building the World We Want.