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 of sheep consists of sheep from both ends of the sheep industry. We have wool sheep and hair/shedding sheep.
Our wool sheep consists mainly of Dorsets and Dorsets crosses. The Dorset is breed is considered dual purpose. This means not only do they have good maternal traits but they produce a very nice and meaty market lamb. The Dorsets are super mothers that produce a nice white fleece with excellent mothering ability and out of season lambing. This allows us to lamb spring and fall with our wool ewes. The Dorsets crosses are varied as we experimented with different breeds to find what worked for us. We have Romney, Texel, and Ile de France blood in some of our crossbreds.
Our hair sheep or shedding sheep as some call them consists mostly 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.
Utilizing the two different types of sheep allows us to maximize the amount of lamb and wool we can produce with the resources we have. We are 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 lot so 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. 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.