Ah yes, the Rams.
Click the link below to jump directly to descriptions of our Katahdin sheep rams for the 2023 breeding season.
Sol
Midnight
Alfalfa
Some important notes about rams
They are beautiful, majestic creatures. They look stunning when they stand gazing off into the sunset. Unfortunately, rams are also fueled by testosterone. They are on an unending quest to be dominant.
Why am I telling you this? Because if you are new to sheep, I want you to be safe. Rams are rude. They are pushy. Rams can be downright dangerous. They bend gates, jump fences, put ram shaped holes in the sides of barns. They can weigh over 200 pounds, and can hit you with enough force to break bones. Plus, even the most seemingly benign ram cannot be trusted. Some day he might decide he wants to knock you into next week.
Now, please don’t be put off by this.
Most rams don’t cause problems most of the time. Generally speaking my rams are lazy and happy to lounge about eating. They couldn’t be bothered to give me the time of day unless I have food with me. I do not keep rams that are mean or who make me feel unsafe. Quite frankly, you shouldn’t keep a mean one either. I don’t care how much money you spent on him. Life is too short, and its not worth risking injury when there are plenty of nice animals out there. BUT, even the nice rams should never be trusted. Their ability to hurt you should always be a consideration.
Set yourself up for success
To set yourself up for success, rams should never be treated as pets. This is particularly true when they are lambs. I know they are little and oh so cute. Resist. A ram lamb handled and made into a pet will lose his natural fear of humans and WILL become dangerous as an adult. Don’t pet them, and don’t encourage them to come up to you unbidden.
Rams are on your farm to make you lambs. That’s it.
Rams are on your farm to do 1 thing, and 1 thing only. Please remember that.
Rams of all ages should be respected for what they are, and should ideally have a space of their own (with a friend) that they can spend most of the year in. This is the safest scenario for both you and your ewes. If you have a separate ram area to keep your ram outside of breeding season, you can enjoy your ewes and lambs without having to constantly watch your back.
If you cannot provide them their own area, then teach your ram to come to the fence for food, and teach him to tie. Put a post by the fence and tie him to the post when you are in the field. Its also a good idea to make your ram wear a bell. That way you will always know where he is and what he is doing.
Rams are essential for even the small flock
Even most very small flocks cannot avoid keeping a ram around. They are essential to every sheep flock. You cannot easily breed your flock any other way. Unlike cows and goats where artificial insemination is a common practice, very little of that is done in sheep. This is because it is not very easy or effective to do in sheep. That means that having a ram is required to get lambs. Selecting the right ram is ESSENTIAL to meeting your breeding goals and improving your flock.
Despite him seeming like nothing more than an extra mouth to feed 10 months of the year, don’t be tempted to buy the cheapest thing you can find every fall. Sure, most any ram will give you lambs, but will they be quality lambs? Probably not. Your rams are important, more important than your ewes and should not be a second thought.
They are 50% of the genetics in your flock.
That’s right 50%. It is worth your while to invest in a quality ram. You cannot easily improve the quality of your flock in any other way.
Before you purchase a ram, think carefully about what your flock is good at. Think also about what they are bad at. What traits do you consider important to improving in your flock? You cannot make any progress improving your flock if you are breeding randomly and selecting for nothing. Conversely you cannot make progress if you are trying to select for too many traits at once. So typically you would select 2 or 3 that are the most important to you and work on improving them. Then chose something else to improve and so on.
So what are we working on?
Currently, we are looking to improve our milkiness without losing any other valuable production traits. We don’t want to sacrifice weaning weight, maternal characteristics, number of lambs born, or their ability to produce on a forage only diet to improve milk production. We still want our sheep to be as productive as possible with minimal help from us. That is what most homesteaders are looking for in an animal, so that is our goal.
We are currently using 3 rams. We believe their individual strengths complement each other nicely. Our goal is to use their diverse genetics to do some line breeding to attempt to make our dairy characteristics more consistent without losing other performance traits.
Though it might seem like a lot for our small flock, using at least 2 rams also allows us to compare lamb performance to see if our rams are doing what we thought they would for our flock. We were very pleased with the performance of the lambs from both Sol and Midnight and are excited to see how their retained ewe lambs perform. We are also looking forward to seeing how Alfalfa’s lambs perform in comparison.
Sol
Sol is a home grown lamb born February 2, 2023. Now normally you buy in rams from somewhere else to get traits to improve your flock. Quite frankly though, I want more of his mother in my flock. I kept him because he performed very well for me this summer, and he has a lot of what I want to increase in my flock.
I purchased his dam on a whim because she was such a beautiful lamb. Well, she turned out to be my best ewe. I wish I had 10 of her. She is a large, solid sheep who who weans big, heavy, fast growing twins every year.
She makes tons of milk for a Katahdin in an udder with large teats that are shaped perfectly for hand milking. She does this all without even a single bite of grain.
Oh, and did I mention, her lambs had by far the lowest parasite burden in my group of lambs this year. This guy was out on pasture with my adult sheep all summer and only carried about 3% of the parasites in my group of lambs. His sister had an even lower worm count. So, we think that is pretty good reason to keep him around for a while! Neither he nor his sister have been dewormed. In fact, our standards are high, and being dewormed is a 1 strike and you’re out offense around here, particularly for rams.
He was also my biggest, fastest growing lamb this year, so we think he is an excellent representation of our best genetics. His flashy color is an added bonus. All that spotting should add much coveted color to the lambs. We have been very pleased with the color and performance of his lambs so far.
Midnight
Midnight is a ram we purchased this summer. He is a registered Katahdin, bred by Baalands. He was sired by a ram with NSIP EBV data. For those of you who don’t know what that is, that stands for the National Sheep Improvement Plan Estimated Breeding Values. This provides valuable data on various traits for selecting breeding stock.
Midnight was chosen for a few reasons. First off, his sire is a well rounded individual who has excellent all around breeding values. His sire also has parasite resistance breeding values well above average. Parasite resistance is important in our climate, so I am always looking to select for sheep that can perform without being dewormed, and any Katahdin ram I buy in MUST move that agenda forward.
Secondly, he was chosen because of his mother. Now it can be difficult to evaluate rams for breeding since we cannot see their udders, lambing rate etc. to know for sure what their offspring will be like. This is where the NSIP EBV’s come in. They help us to guess how a rams’ offspring will perform. Ewe performance on the other hand is much easier to evaluate, and is also very much worth considering when purchasing a ram. Midnight’s dam is from a line of sheep that were upgraded to registered Katahdins. She has a small amount of Lacaune (dairy breed) in her. She is very milky and raises triplets every year without any assistance. Both are traits we want in our flock.
Alfalfa
Alfalfa is a NSIP ram out of Ewe Lamb Right born spring 2024. We were lucky enough to purchase him with a few ewe lambs (who excel at various traits) in the fall of 2024. He has good parasite resistance and should produce milky offspring that will wean large lambs. All traits we consider important here. Additionally he carries two copies of the myostatin gene (which is fairly rare in Katahdins), and is resistant to the diseases Scrapie and OPP. All his offspring will be Scrapie resistant, and carriers of OPP resistance and myostatin.
For those of you unfamiliar with the myostatin gene, it is the double muscling gene. Not many sheep breeds carry it. However it is desirable. it increase growth rate, and these animals have 5-10% more lean muscle and 5-10% less fat depending on how many copies of the gene they carry.
Our hope is that these genetics will complement our other two rams nicely, and that through some careful line breeding we can continue on our quest to produce a line of parasite resistant, fast growing, meaty Katahdins with more consistent dairy traits for homesteaders. We are striving for that all purpose without the hassle of wool sheep that so many people are seeking.
And lucky for us he also carries spotting so can upgrade our genetics while continue to produce the spotted sheep our customers desire. Unfortunately he arrived too late in the fall to participate much in the 2024 breeding season, so his first lamb crop will be on the ground in 2026. We can’t wait to see his lambs and what he looks like when he finishes growing.
Our past ram was Beetlejuice.
He sired our lambs for both 2022 and 2023.
Beetlejuice came from a commercial Katahdin flock that was focused on lambing in January to have all lambs sold for the Easter market. So he did some things well. He was fat off of air and produced good solid, fast growing lambs for us.
He retired after breeding season in fall of 2022. We decided it was time to replace him as we had kept a bunch of his daughters to increase the size of our flock. Based on his daughter’s performance as yearlings in 2023, we do not think that he was bringing the milkiness and udder confirmation we are looking for into our flock.
I have retained his son Sol. We are hoping that Sol will combine the best of his traits with the best of his dam’s traits resulting in some outstanding lambs.
If you have any other questions about our rams, or keeping rams on your farm, please let us know!
