we did this... but added east fresian / lacauna cross ewes because we had a ram line we're working with. I've had a dozen or so ewes now that are 1/2 or 1/4 fresian/lacouna ... we regularly get twins and occasionally trips from them and we haven't *had* to bottle feed any of them.
we found with the trips, there's usually one getting the sort end of the milk, so we supplement that one with once- or twice-daily milk from our dairy goats. I suspect if we didn't that 3rd lamb would still be fine, just grow a little slower than it's sibs. next year we might pull the third lamb and just bottle raise them and see how that works for us.
things I've noted -
the fresian/lacouna full blood and crosses are calm, curious, bold and less fearful of people in general.
they definitely out-produce the majority of our other ewes in the milk department. (we have a few non-dairy sheep that are exceptional producers.)
they're good mothers, attentive and can count to 3 when they've got triplets.
we haven't had trips from any of our non-dairy line sheep, although we get almost entirely twins.
the dairy and dairy cross ewes seem to lose more condition while in milk than our other ewes - they get thinner and take a little longer to build back up after weaning. that was a little unnerving at first but it seems to be just the way they are. we do suplement their feed, and we're still playing with that to see if we can keep their weight up more, but so far, there's a noticable difference between the dairy ewes and the non-dairy line ewes in this department.
the dairy line sheep can EAT and they are ALWAYS hungry. we don't measure relative feed amounts, but they're first to the feed bucket and last to leave it.
the dairy line lambs grow FAST.
at 1/4 dairy sheep we're getting nice heavy market lambs. the 1/2 dairy line lambs are good weight, but don't have quite the beefy structure that our current ram does. the 1/4 dairy line lambs from the same ram have his heavy build, just longer legs and quicker growth rate.
our full dairy ewes are more worm-suspeptable than the rest of the flock so we have to watch them for worm signs more carefully. haven't noticed this to be true with the 1/2 and 1/4 dairy line sheep.
and... sheep are hard to hand milk. if you want to know more about this, ask. but the milk is aMAZing and it's all I'd ever have if I had a choice.
we cut back our flock a lot this summer because we're in the process of moving cross country, but in the spring we'll be adding some more fresians or fresian/lacouna ewes. it's worked really well for us. our ram line is mixed breed meat and wool sheep we've selected for quick growth, large size, heavy carcass, calm temperament, and medium-grade wool production. we'll probably stay with this ram line and add dairy ewes and retain dairy ewe crosses for the next two or three years, then introduce a new meat-breed ram line.
