Our sheep live on pasture and eat forage year round
Katahdin Sheep
Our flock of registered Katahdin sheep are well-suited to living their lives on pasture and are rotationally grazed to keep them healthy and improve the health of our pastures.
Registered Katahdin Rams
While our sheep are bred primarily for meat production, we hold back any ram lambs with exceptional structure, growth rate, parasite resistance and demeanors to offer as registered breeding stock.
Our foundation ewes
The ewes that make up our foundation flock were selected for their hardiness, parasite resistance, and ability to thrive and raise big healthy lambs naturally on pasture. By selecting rams that have characteristics we’d like to see more of in our flock, we are able to improve the traits of our existing flock year after year as we keep back our ewe lambs to grow our flock.
Phenomenal Meat
Some folks are skeptical about lamb because they’ve had a bad experience with gamey lamb in the past. Katahdin meat is mild, mellow, and extremely versatile. It’s flavorful enough to hold up to assertive sauces while also being a great go-to for many meals. Because our lamb is grass fed, pastured, and rotationally grazed, you can be confident that not only is it healthier for you, it’s also healthier for the planet. We have options for custom-processed whole lambs as well as individual cuts, available in late 2024
What is rotational grazing and why is it important?
Rotational grazing is giving grazing animals access to limited portions of a larger pasture for a limited time, then moving them to a new portion of that pasture. There are almost as many different practices of rotational grazing as there are farms, but the main thing is to move livestock from one paddock to another. This does a lot of good things for the animals and the pasture.
During the grazing season, our sheep get moved around our farm. They are shifted to new paddocks every few days to a week depending on how much forage is available. In the first day or so in a paddock, the sheep will eat their favorite things in that paddock. Over the next few days, they’ll munch on some of the less desirable things and make some progress on trampling down some of the taller things that they don’t want to eat. By the end of their time in a paddock, our sheep will have eaten most of what they’re willing to eat, and we move them to a fresh paddock to start the process over.
By forcing the sheep to not pick and choose what they eat, it spreads their impact over all of the plants in the pasture. If they were able to only eat what they wanted most, wait for regrowth, and then come back and eat it again, they would wipe out the tastiest plants in the pasture, leaving only the less desirable forage. The trampling process helps to encourage new growth, shade the soil, and increase organic matter on the surface of the soil, all of which help the soil hold more water and nutrients, improving resilience in periods of drought and helping to fertilize the pasture naturally.
This helps keep the sheep healthy because they’re constantly on the move. It keeps them moving to clean fresh pastures regularly, not eating from areas where they’ve been pooping, which reduces parasite pressure and flies. Our sheep are protected from predators using electric net fencing, and are provided with access to high-quality minerals, salt, kelp meal, and sodium bicarbonate to regulate their rumen health. They have regularly checked and filled waterers, and always have access to shade and shelter in the form of trees or a shade structure.