Christine English discusses her Romney sheep flock, sheep breeding, and Icelandic wool producer Stefania Dignum.

Christine English discusses her Romney sheep flock, sheep breeding, and Icelandic wool producer Stefania Dignum.

July 23, 2021

© Kingston Handloom Weavers and Spinners

Shaelagh Cull

Christine English

Zoom

We had a commercial flock to start with, so we already had a whole lot of different breeds represented. Because I'd had some interest in wool, where it made sense, I tried to get a little bit of wool influence so I had a little Border Leicester. I had used to Border Leicester ram and a Corriedale ram at different point and I was pretty involved with sheep breeding and sheep production. On a commercial level, there was a record of performance thing where you had to weigh and measure lambs at 50 days and 100 days and keep records and send them in and they computerized everything and, you know, ranked them and it helped you in selecting for producting ewe that grew lambs. And I'd actually had been on the Board of the sheep marketing agency for our district and been a person that went check farms, so I had a lot of background in sheep breeding already. When my husband decided farming wasn't going to pay and moved on to other work, I switched from my emphasis on the sheep being meat, which it still had to, they still had to be productive ewes to stay in my flock because that's where the bulk of the money came. But with a lot of extra effort and some breeding I was able to get fleeces where I could get almost as much for fleece as a lamb, and that really helped. Plus I was just a lot more interested in it. So I had this big nucleus flock. I started importing Romneys after I decided that that was the direction I wanted to go with my wool. And then I, because I wanted to get some colors that weren't available in any of the regular domestic breeds, I was a friend, I think she would probably was also a Guild member, Stefania Digman imported the first Icelandic sheep to North America. She was herself an Icelander, and she lived not far from where we were. And so I bought some purebred Icelandic ewes that had colors and patterns that weren't available the other breeds. So I used purebred Romney rams on my crossbred, my best cross bred ewes in terms of fleece and productivity, and on these Icelandic ewes, and then I took the best cross bed Rams that had the colors and patterns I wanted, genetics, back on to my crossbred flock with increasing amounts of Romney in it. But I always maintained a purebred flock on the side for a lot of years. And my goal was to produce a highly crimped, fairly fine, soft, silky, Romney-type, finer Romney-type fleece with a full range of colors. It was kind of fun, it was like at Christmas, you don't know what's going to be in a package because I'd never know quite what was going to come out color-wise or pattern-wise or fleece-wise from the animals. It wasn't just, you know, 100 white lambs. I had up to sometimes 200 animals on the farm at a time, counting lambs and sheep. And I culled pretty heavily, I was really disappointed in some of my early Romneys that had problems with prolapses and bad teeth and not high lambing percentages and other things. But I think it was pretty much improved over time. I showed fleeces that the Royal Reno fair and Sheep Focus, which was a provincial sheep thing. And I one year I had both Reserve Champion and Champion Fleece at the Royal and I had Grand Champion Fleece at Sheep Focus one year. And then I got tired of the rigmarole that was involved in registered sheep and so I sold my entire Romney flock to Stoddard Farm in 2007, they were over near Gueph, I think that direction, because they were into rare breed conservancy and 4-H and showing and they were more willing to do the tattooing and the record keeping that was involved with purebreds and I was having more fun and I was actually having better production out of my crossbred ewes. But then a year later, I I sold all my sheep when I did this late life degree, I had to move to Hamilton for a year. And I just found out a couple of days ago that actually 21 of those animals, or at least the bloodlines from them that I sold to the Stoddards were bought by Twin Oaks Farm in the Guelp area, who was one of the suppliers at this year spinning seminar. And she and I have just exchanged emails and we're going to try to connect and she wants to learn more about my imports and the genetics.