A look at the Wisconsin sheep business – Audio
The Wisconsin sheep business
David Thomas, Professor
Department of Animal Science
UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences
dlthomas@wisc.edu
Phone (608) 263-4306, (608) 263-4300
3:02 – Total Time
0:15 – The Wisconsin sheep business
0:35 – Many people with a few sheep
1:08 – Economic value of sheep
1:34 – Shifting breeds of sheep
2:11 – Dairy sheep
2:29 – University support for dairy sheep
2:53 – Lead out
TRANSCRIPT
Sevie Kenyon: A look at the Wisconsin sheep business we’re visiting today with David Thomas Department of Animal Science University of Wisconsin Madison in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, and I’m Sevie Kenyon. David, give us an idea about the sheep business here in Wisconsin.
David Thomas: We have about 80,000 sheep in the state and that ranks us just below the top third of the states in numbers, but what we do have a lot of are people that raise sheep. We have about 2,600 producers in the state that ranks us ninth in the nation in the number of sheep operations.
Sevie Kenyon: Describe a typical operation.
David Thomas: Well, if you take the number of breeding ewes that we have in the state divided by the number of operations it comes down to about an average of 25 ewes per flock, which is fairly small. Many of them are flocks that raise a few pure bread ewes, many of them to show. And then we have an increasing number that are providing direct marketing of lambs and also adding value to wool for the fiber arts industry.
Sevie Kenyon: What’s the sheep business worth in the state?
David Thomas: We estimate about nine and a half million dollars in farm gate income and that is divided into, about, a little less than eight and a half million dollars in sheep meat about a quarter of a million dollars is wool and about one million dollars is in milk sales, sheep milk.
Sevie Kenyon: David how many different kinds of sheep might we have here in the state?
David Thomas: There are a lot, I would say we easily have 40 to 45 different breeds of sheep in Wisconsin. It really has changed in recent years. About ten percent of the world sheep population are hair sheep and one of those breeds is a breed that was developed here in the United States Katahdin, and for the last two years the Katahdin breed has registered more sheep than any other single breed. So we’ve had a move in the U.S. from sheep that produce wool to sheep that produce hair.
Sevie Kenyon: David you mentioned sheep milk, talk to me a little bit about the dairy sheep business here.
David Thomas: Sheep milk is used primarily for cheese. We have, I think, currently 19 licensed sheep dairies in Wisconsin and they’ll produce a little over one million pounds of sheep milk per year that goes into specialty cheese manufacturing.
Sevie Kenyon: What role does the University have in these dairy sheep?
David Thomas: We have the only dairy sheep research program in all of North America here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Department of Food Science and the Center for Dairy Research here on campus has done a lot of work over the last few years on sheep milk processing. So we’re very proud of the signature role that we’ve played in the development of this new industry.
Sevie Kenyon: We’ve been visiting with David Thomas Department of Animal Science University of Wisconsin Madison in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, and I’m Sevie Kenyon.