All about Dairy Sheep…sort of

We started with a single almost-dry dairy ewe six years ago.

I had purchased some sheep cheese from a local grocery store and was amazed at the flavor! Since we already did dairy goats and cattle, I knew we wanted dairy sheep! Within weeks we found a ewe for sale (in our own state!!). The man hadn’t really milked her, didn’t really know anything about her, but she was fairly gentle and we bought her! From there on, we’ve continued to grow and expand our dairy sheep flock. This year our sheep loving daughter freshened in 10 ewes!!! 😳

Ya. It’s a lot. A lot to handle. A lot to feed. And we just plan to do more.

Here’s a few differences of dairy sheep and dairy goats—based only on our experience and observations—

Dairy Goats have nicer udders. You can find stylish, well conformed udders with good attachment, teat size can be very comfortable to hand milk.

Dairy Sheep have saggy, swingy udders with teats pointing in every direction except down. I’m not even sure sheep know what good udder attachment is! Teats are generally small, except for the few that are very large.

Goats easily jump onto a milk stand, sheep grudgingly hop onto a short stand.

Goats are slick and clean hided, sheep are fuzzy even after shearing. Everything sticks to wool, and wool grows EVERYWHERE.

Goats learn to lead easily, sheep lead ok and don’t really like too.

Goats will easily milk 3 -6 quarts a day…so do sheep, except its pints, not quarts.

Goats will milk 6-10 months, sheep will milk 3-6 months.

Both are seasonal breeders (despite what Google says) and have 150 day gestations.

Sheep milk has an incredible higher amount of fat, protein, and energy! Seriously—it’s like a loaded sports drink! Sheep milk flavor is nicer than goat milk flavor.

Sheep milk produces much higher cheese yield than goat milk.

We absolutely LOVE lamb! Every part of it!

Wool “can” be and added value…or it can just be a hassle to shear annually. Sheep are less troublesome, and less smart than goats. They’re also less pet-like and rarely underfoot.

Sheep don’t mind standing in the rain at all, unlike goats who believe they’ll melt with every drop!

Bucks stink, Rams are Jerks.

Sheep are never sick. They’re either absolutely the picture of health, or going to die in 18 minutes.

Humidity, ticks, heat, parasites—goats, hair sheep, and wool sheep are about the same. Much depends on your individual management and the overall vigor of your animals.

As I mentioned in the beginning, this is just my experience. I know there’s plenty of sorry dairy goats (we’ve had our share!). And I know there’s better dairy sheep (just not many, and availability is low in the US).

My best advice is to start where you are, improve what you have, and cull hard! We were down to 1 ewe, 1 ewe lamb, and 1 ram just a couple years ago!!! (It was a series of unfortunate events). This season we’re milking 9 and she doesn’t want to sell any. She’s also retaining 6-7 ewe lambs to add to the milk string next spring. I’m sure we’ll cull heavy again then!

The ewes are all going down in production, but we’re still getting about 3 gallons a day.