What are low input or easy care sheep?
This site is 'about' grazing sheep in the orchard. Not just any sheep, but low input, easy care sheep. Wool shedding, hardy sheep that don't require much shearing, dagging, hoof clipping, footrot treating, or fly or louse spraying or treating. Sheep that are resiliant to worm infestation, and resistant to facial eczema. Sheep that come to the call, are placid, intelligent, docile. Sheep that give birth easily, are excellent mothers. Sheep tolerant of nutitional imbalances in pasture, tolerant of  toxins in grasses.

In other words, a fantasy site!

But elements of all these attributes - inheritable genetic traits - exist to greater or lesser extent in animals within commercial and hobby flocks in New Zealand.

The ideal lifestyle orchard sheep versus the commercial sheep
The interests of the lifestyle orchardist and the commercial sheep farmers overlap where resistance to disease and parasites is concerned, but are opposite when wool is considered. From the commercial point of view, if you are going to grow sheep that need to be shorn, you might as well grow as much wool as possible without compromising the meat value. (If you are a home spinner, the interests of the commercial fine wool/meat sheep grower and the lifestyle spinner are the same.)

The single greatest point of difference is whether or not sheep should be a wool-shedding breed. Wool-shedding avoids having to organise shearing, and helps reduce dags, and thus flystrike.

A widely dispersed pool of cross bred sheep might accumulate enough genetic merit to fit lifestyle orchard needs

No sheep breed will ever be developed that meets the needs of the low-input lifestyle orchardist.

Breeds and breed societies largely develop from existing rare or commercial breeds, or newly created commercial breeds of high value. The lifestyle orchardist interest is non-commercial, so there is no pressure at all to develop a 'low-input' orchard 'breed' as such. There is a high turnover of people entering and exiting rural living. Therefore, there is little continuity in knowledge. Often, gains represented by a carefully selected small flock can be quickly lost as people move on.

If there is sufficient information on the pros and cons of the various existing breeds - especially wool shedding breeds - then there is a logical basis for people crossing both breeds, and individuals within breeds, to accumulate as much genetic merit as possible. If  such crossbreds of merit are widely dispersed, gains made are more likely to be conserved - even if the original breeder drops out of rural living. If widely dispersed 'flocklets' are involve a variety of breeds, the danger of inbreeding is practically eliminated.

Communication is a key element to creating and drawing on a gene pool that is tiny in any one place, but large enough to be useful if considered in total. If people can communicate the specific 'low input' merits of the sheep they have to others with 'low input' sheep of some merit, then overall, gains can accumulate. As people will have their own idiosynchratic ideas and values, useful genetic diversity may be retained.

So many traits are important in 'low-input' sheep that selection for one feature alone - say wool shedding - may cause other similarly desirable traits - say worm resiliance - to drift. In contrast, some well founded commercial flocks are now turning attention to improving just such critical traits as worm resiliance. Therefore, home orchardists will probably want to 'dip into' such animals to obtain resiliance, and may have to sacrifice degree of wool shedding (for example) until both traits are fixed over time. Which could be ten years or more.

Realistically, there may not be sufficient numbers of lifestylers with sheep - or larger home orchards - to sustain this interest. But it is worth communicating the ideas.

It costs very little to introduce ideas on the internet via a homepage, just time. This is my contribution as someone with a home orchard and who has turned to sheep to try to cope with 'the grass problem', and found the sheep I bought wanting. Obviously, I can only reflect on my own limited experiences, which must be biased. Other peoples particular circumstances will be different.

Biases of this site

• This site is biased to wool-shedding sheep as a critical pre-condition to truly low input sheep.
• It is biased to humid warm conditions north of Auckland, with the associated growing patterns and pests of that climate region.
• It is biased toward the principle that the outward characteristics of a breed - face shape, wool color, length, and pattern,  size etc - may be very uniform, but this apparent uniformity masks significant variability in very important 'invisible traits' - worm resiliance, endophyte tolerance, fungal toxin tolerance, temperament, hoof growth rate and hardness, and so on.

The function of this site

• Speculate on what direction(s) to go to develop populations of 'low-input' sheep
• List the problems and frustrations of having to deal with sheep in an orchard, and any tips for eliminating or reducing them either by breeding, knowledge, or useful 'stuff'
• Provide a page where people can either list low-input sheep for sale or link to their own home page
• Provide a place where people can informally contribute any useful thing on the subject they care to write

Subject