We live here on our 120 acre farm in east central Illinois. Our main focus is on raising sheep. We do raise some crops but prefer to concentrate on the sheep. We started raising sheep about 7 years ago. But we have been livestock producers our entire lives. Rob grew up on a cattle and hog farm. The safety of the kids around animals led us to try sheep and we have never looked back.
Our flock is made up of hair sheep or shedding sheep as some call them consists of Dorpers. The Dorpers are meaty sheep that do not require shearing and produce an excellent lamb to market. They also will breed out of season allowing us to supply lambs through out the year. We lamb later than most purebred operations with most of our lambs being born in April. We like to lamb in April due to the weather. Our weather is normally warmer then and we can turn the ewes out on pasture. No need to jug the ewes or use heat lamps to warm lambs up. This later lambing allows use to utilize our fresh lush spring pastures for the ewes to produce lots of milk. It is much more efficient and cost effective to let the ewes harvest the grass than for us to do it mechanically. We are beginning to try for some fall lambings. We plan for early fall so that the newborns don't have to deal with the cold. Although the fall lambings are not necessarily the most cost effective way to raise lambs it does allow us to have lambs for market year round.
In August 2010, we expanded our farm to include Savanna goats. Our does are due to kid in September. We are very excited!