Have you been to your local eye doctor or hearing specialist lately?  What about the dentist?  If not, you’re missing a way to get professionals to sell sheep for you.

      Some years ago, while handling hay in a swirling wind, I got a tiny little horse nettle thorn caught in my eyelid, which raked and scratched the surface of my eye every time I blinked.

Anyone who has ever had to put up with these horse nettles in the hay (also called sand briers or Sodom apples) knows how troublesome its thorns are.  No part of the plant except the root and the tomato-like fruit is free of the thorns.  The thorns easily break off and stay in your flesh like a barbed splinter.  Sheep eat these plants to a certain extent but it’s far from their first-choice forage.

      After several days of being unable to retrieve that little thorn stuck under my eyelid, my eye surface began to become opaque—like a lamb’s eye does when it has an in-turned eyelid (entropion).

      Overcoming my “sheepskate” tendencies, I finally went to an ophthalmologist to see if he could get it out.  His secretary squeezed one last appointment into the end of the doctor’s busy day, so I sat around the waiting room with at least 10 other people ahead of me, while I read the latest sheep!  (Reading sheep! in waiting rooms is a good way to pique folks’ curiosity, often striking up a conversation that can lead to profitable retail sales.)

Breed is an important factor in determining success for small sheep farms.

Many sheep farms start as a hobby, the owners innocently buying whatever sheep are locally available—as long as they look reasonably healthy.

In a way, there is good justification for this, in that the sheep they buy have proven themselves to be adapted to the region.

Also, travel and transport costs will in that way be kept to the minimum.  If we start with a high investment, reason tells us it will be longer before we get a reasonable return.

Naturally these money-saving methods can’t be fully applied to sheep purchased for the pageantry of showing.  There simply may not be any sheep available locally whose structure and growth rates could compete in the ring against sheep owned and exhibited by top show winners.

Imagine the added cost of buying and bringing home faraway registered sheep—sheep that will require extra attention above the cost of non-purebred animals obtained from a local auction.

It would be far more devastating to get up one morning to discover some of your purebred sheep dead, killed by neighbors’ free-roaming dogs, or by coyotes.

Would any purebred sheep be worth these risks of loss?

If the flockmaster’s goal is profit, then the answer to that question is still definitely yes, due to one aspect of the purebred:  Its traits don’t vary significantly from animal to animal.

That one fact assures your customers of the single most important feature your merchandise can ever have in any business:  Reliability.

Without reliability, you simply cannot have a “brand” that folks come to trust.  You really can’t even have a product, because none of the most important attributes of your merchandise can even be identified.

Lamb and mutton tastings lately conducted around the U.S. have begun silencing decades of pooh-poohing at breed-based flavor differences by growers of America’s most populous sheep breeds.

Today, mid-size and large-scale sheep farms are still disappearing at an alarming pace because stock isn’t chosen based on consumer preference—as it should have been—but instead on suitability to modern management practices and flexible financing.

Local sheep farm success is limited by 5 main traits:  1. Meat flavor.  2. Local adaptability.  3. Prolificacy.  4. Growth rate.  5. Wool and/or pelt demand.

Numbers of larger sheep outfits have continued fading, but small operations are now growing rapidly in numbers, due largely to careful choice of pure breed.

Choosing and raising the right pure breed for your place requires careful study, some added risk, good husbandry, and more attentive marketing.  Yet it is the straightest path to the repeat customers that want to bring you their money and take home your flock products.