East Friesian Sheep

[boykin2010]

Are there any dairy breeds that dont have wool? I raise hair sheep (katahdins and barbados crosses) and would love to add some dairy crosses in to increase the milk of the mothers. The barbados gene really doesnt help that much in the milk department. It made my crosses become tall and lanky. So far, udders are very small and i am most likely going to have trouble out of the crosses this year not being able to take care of the lambs. BUT they are disease resistant from the barbados. If i could just cross that with a dairy breed it may be perfect crosses

 

[77Herford]

you're welcome.

a couple more thoughts:

we haven't had the cross in our line long enough to have 1/4 dairy ewes bred and lambing yet, so I don't know how the 1/8 dairy lambs grow. we'll have a couple of those this year... if we like the result we'll look at orienting our ewe base to 1/4 crosses. if we don't, we'll try to keep 1/2 dairy crosses in our producing ewe flock.

I think the reason the 1/2 dairy and 1/4 dairy lambs grow so fast is partly just that dairy sheep seem to start quicker and go up faster, but also that they're getting all the high quality milk they can use because the ewes are high producers.

we haven't tried to quantify the difference in milk production between our full and 1/2 dairy ewes... the full dairy ewes definitely sport bigger udders, but I don't know if the milk production is significantly different between the two groups. we haven't noticed any significant difference in the growth rate of their lambs, just that the 1/4 lambs are heavier built than the 1/2 lambs.

it will be interesting to see how 1/4 dairy ewes produce. I do think there'll be some milk production loss at 1/4 dairy genes, I don't know if it will be compensated for by the growth rate of the lambs. my expectation is tht it won't and we'll want to stay with mostly 1/2 dairy production ewes.

in the diary and dairy crosses, we've had very little trouble with slow to stand, dumb lambs, or lambs that can't figure out which end to nurse. we did have some of this in our ram-line before we added the dairy ewes, and occasionally see it in our non-dairy line lambs. the dairy lambs seem to arrive alert and active, and they've improved that in our flock.

the dairy sheep have lower grade wool, and considerably less of it, and we do see some of that in reduced quality wool in the first and second generation lambs. if you're breeding to hair sheep, you may or may not get year-round wool, but they generally are not going to add heavy wool. we ended up with one ewe (not a dairy ewe) that we think may be 1/2 hair sheep, probably dorper / romney cross. she's got heavy wool, year round growth, and heavy guard hair that makes the wool worthless... my guess is that's sort of what you'll see on your first gen crosses - wool the weight of the diary parent, and year round growth (needing sheering) but with the guard hair that will make the wool not very saleable. if you find that's NOT true, I'd be interested to hear about it. I dont' know anyone who's running 50/50 hair/wool crosses that get full hair sheep shedding... but my selection to comment on is really small, just a few sheep with backyard breeders.

can't think of anything else at the moment, let me know if you've got questions I haven't covered.

Yes, I'll probably be doing 1/2 Rams with my Kat ewes to get 1/4 if that works, lol.

 

[77Herford]

Are there any dairy breeds that dont have wool? I raise hair sheep (katahdins and barbados crosses) and would love to add some dairy crosses in to increase the milk of the mothers. The barbados gene really doesnt help that much in the milk department. It made my crosses become tall and lanky. So far, udders are very small and i am most likely going to have trouble out of the crosses this year not being able to take care of the lambs. BUT they are disease resistant from the barbados. If i could just cross that with a dairy breed it may be perfect crosses

You know I bet a three way cross of Barbados/Finnsheep/East Friesian would be a great all around breed. If you got the disease resistance of the Barbados, the lambing prolificy of the Finn and the milking productivity of the Friesian that could be a great mix. If the mothers could have enough milk to raise quads that would make like easier.

Oh and for any dairy breeds with no wool, I don't know of any.

 

[zzGypsy]

I did a quick search and didn't find any evidence of dairy hair sheep.

here's a quick fact sheet on dairy sheep, might be worth a read: http://www.dbicusa.org/documents/Dairy Sheep Fact Sheet.pdf

 

[ruminantlover27]

How hard is it to milk a sheep by hand?

 

[zzGypsy]

How hard is it to milk a sheep by hand?

tiny teats, in general, and well up under the flank rather than on the bottom like goats, so it's much harder to milk them out. plus they go out of milk much more easily than goats, and if you don't get them milked all the way down daily they'll shut off production. at best, 6 months production then they turn off the tap

I hand milked the first two years and the best I was able to do was 4 months before they shut off.

got a milker for this year - we'll see how I do with that.

that all said, the milk is like sweetened half and half - the single best thing you could ever put on cereal or in your coffee! makes extrordinary butter too.

 

[Lacaune]

I did a quick search and didn't find any evidence of dairy hair sheep.

here's a quick fact sheet on dairy sheep, might be worth a read: http://www.dbicusa.org/documents/Dairy Sheep Fact Sheet.pdf

The person on the first page milking sheep is my wife Emily milking the ewes at the UW-Madison's Dairy Sheep Research facility at Spooner, WI in 1995.