Sheep breeding and management.

  • Great Britain. Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.
Date:
1956
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sheep breeding and management. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    9/106 (page 1)
    SHEEP BREEDING AND MANAGEMENT Introduction THE sheep is a multi-purpose animal yielding wool and flesh, milk and parchment, to say nothing of such oddments as tallow and soap; moreover it is a preserver — in some senses a creator — of land fertility. ‘The fortunes of sheep husbandry have ebbed and flowed and changed direction again and again as the relative values of its several products have changed. ‘Today, after a long period of depressed prices, wool has resumed something of its former monetary value. Paradoxically, hill sheep are not expensively clad, but in the lowlands it is a poor sheep that does not wear a winter coat worth £1. It is a curious fact that the fibres making up a fleece are not good heat insulators. Their value lies rather in their form than in their substance. Owing to their natural wave or “‘crimp’’, they entangle air when massed in fleece or yarn and then acquire properties possessed by no other product, natural or artificial. Strong, elastic, durable, absorbent, heat-retaining and almost fireproof, wool would seem, as Allan Fraser has said, “especially designed by Providence for the health and comfort of mankind as well as for sheep’’. It is capable even of generating heat while absorbing moisture. We do not know what types of sheep existed in early times. They must have roamed the fells and mountains of the Pennines and Wales, a major care of pastoral folk; probably they were small and not very thick on the ground. In the south and east, where the life of a denser human popula- tion centred in villages and large arable fields, rather bigger sheep lived on the wastes or in the forest and were admitted to the arable land at specified periods only. So controlled, they were invaluable to the community, produc- ing at once a source of income from wool, milk and meat for subsistence, and fertility to the fallows. They were integrated with the farming system. In the turbulent centuries which saw the break-up of the manors, a very different situation arose. Sheep became, in effect, an alternative to farming. Wool was very profitable — it formed the foundation of our commercial history — but no means existed to combine large-scale wool production and corn growing. No one as yet had any conception of what in modern times is called alternate husbandry; that had to await the introduction of “‘artificial’’ grasses and roots. So the sheep became a leading figure on the national stage, part cause and part effect of a social and economic revolution. Cultivated lands and common grazings alike were turned into ranches for commercial wool production, particularly in the eastern counties, the chalk lands of the south, and the Cotswolds; though from the prominence which Leominster achieved as a wool market it would seem that sheep must have been very plentiful also in the counties of the Welsh marches. Development of the meat qualities of sheep came in the eighteenth century as land was enclosed and men learned to cultivate crops in a full rotation. It coincided in time with the flowering of Bakewell’s genius. Equally important from the standpoint of British flocks was the transform-