Ever since we started our homesteading journey, we have been interested in livestock breeds that are multi-purpose. Since we started with just 3 acres on a mountainside, every animal needed to be as productive as possible. All sheep have fleece on them, but many breeds do not make a fleece soft enough to knit up a sweater or item that will be against the skin. All sheep have meat on them, but some are smaller and thus make it less worth it to butcher them. All sheep make milk for their lambs, but many breeds don’t make enough milk, nor have good enough udder conformation nor calm temperament to make it worth it to milk them.
Thus, there are the dairy breeds: great milk production and calm disposition; scratchy fleece generally good for rug making and such; and somewhat smaller, bony build, with not as much meat on them. There are the meat breeds: average milk production and generally not as calm; short, scratchy fleece; lots of higher quality meat and fast growth. There are the wool breeds: average milk production and can be calm or not; beautiful wool available for a lot of different fiber arts; some are bigger with more meat, but not as much meat as a meat breed.
There are breeds that are considered dual-purpose: good in 2 different categories at once. Most dual-purpose breeds are wool and meat. Often they won’t be as good in either one as the specific meat or wool breeds are.
In our attempts to have multi-purpose sheep for our homestead, especially with dairy and wool characteristics, we tried crossing our wool breeds over the dairy breeds in hopes of improving the fleece but still keeping dairy qualities. Our ewe, Nora, is the result of that. She is larger than an average dairy sheep and has larger lambs, and she has milk production, udder conformation, and disposition that is just as good as our dairy sheep. But her fleece did not improve much – it is a bit longer and softer, but not much. Definitely not soft enough for against-the-skin items.
Meanwhile, we have been raising BFLs for fleece and meat and have loved them. We have focused on finer fleece to the point of next-to-skin softness. Last year, while I was watching the BFL lambs bounce around and play, it occurred to me that the BFLs often triplet, and if they often triplet that means they have higher milk production. At that point we started discussing the idea of milking the BFLs. We started evaluating the udder conformation on each ewe and planning to try out milking them this spring after lambing.
As we closed in on lambing and the udders filled up, we decided that our newest ewe, Lacey, had the nicest one for milking. We were very surprised by her teat placement. Sheep tend to have their teats on the side of the udder towards the front. Whereas goats and cows have the teats pointing downward. It is easier to milk teats that point downward. Lacey has teats that point downward. She is also a calm girl with a friendly disposition. We were delighted when she had triplet lambs, and moved forward with our plans to milk a BFL sheep.
We have been very excited with the results.
- Production: Lacey has good production. Not as high as our most productive dairy sheep, but high enough for a homestead for family use. How long her production will go and if it will hold up during that time is still in question. But we plan to continue to milk her and find out how she performs long-term.
- Udder Conformation: Her udder is just as easy to milk as the dairy ewes we own, with nice teat and orifice size. Her teat placement is actually better than any of our dairy sheep, with the downward pointing teats – making her very easy to milk!
- Temperament: She has been calm and easy to train to the stanchion and milking. At first she had trouble letting down (common for any of our first-time milking ewes), but we brought her lambs in and let them nurse on her while she stood in the stanchion and that helped her learn that she could relax and let-down while standing in the stanchion. She is still a little timid and afraid she will fall off the stanchion, but I think that time will fix that.
It has been a success! We are really excited about milking our BFL ewe, making her a triple-purpose sheep. We are looking forward to continuing to milk her through the full season and see how her production holds up and how long it continues. We are planning to keep one of her ewe lambs to see if her udder conformation and production turn out as good as her mother. We will continue to update as we move forward with this new “experiment.”
Willow Creek Farm 