The Meat Sheep – My WordPress

A new sheep breed developed in Maine

by Charlie Calley
January 1983

The black Border Collie looks like an ordinary housepet sitting in the back of the pick-up truck, but when his master, Charles Brown, drops the tailgate Lolo scoots out and darts under the sheep pasture fence. Brown, who is shepherd and manager of Piel Farm in Abbott, Maine hops over the woven wire and spots the flock of about 30 rams off at the other end of the pasture. “Go get ’em, Lolo,” says Charles. “All around!”

Lolo takes off like a black streak, running silently across the pasture. “I can’t say enough about that dog,” Charles says. “Lolo is as good as five hired hands. When it comes to working sheep, he’s something else. He’ll go out in the pasture and get them for you. He’ll hold ’em too.”

Sure enough. In about two minutes, Lolo has the rams running full tilt toward Charles. “He’s doing pretty good today,” says Charles. “These rams are harder to handle ‘ than ewes.” Just then, the flock splits in two halves running in different directions. Lolo responds swiftly. He easily outruns one group and turns them back toward the other rams.

*Piel Farm shepherd Charles Brown examines some rams*

The dog herds the rams to a spot about 10 feet from Charles and somehow stops them cold. Lolo’s sharp eyes seem to have a hypnotic effect on the rams and they don’t budge. Charles is able to walk in among the rams and examine them without fuss.

These rams Lolo is holding are probably the most unusual sheep in New England. They are Katahdins — a breed that has been developing at Piel Farm since 1957. A new breed with the potential of revolutionizing sheep farming, Katahdins are sheep, but they don’t have wool. The person most responsible for developing the Katahdin breed was Michael Piel, a descendent of the beer brewing family, who died.in 1979. “lt was his idea to develop a single purpose meat animal,” says Charles Brown, Piel’s protege, who manages the farm for Piel’s widow, Barbara. “He was an educated man, and a very smart man when it came to genetics. He could talk for hours on the subject and keep you thinking about what he said long afterwards.”

“When Mike started with sheep 25 years ago, it was with the idea of developing a woolless sheep. He went through thousands of sheep to arrive at where we are today;” says Charles. Today, the Piel Farm flock numbers 400 Katahdins, with about 200 breeding ewes. Several dozen representatives of the wool breeds are kept as well. At one point in the mid-1960’s, Piel Farm kept more than 2,000 head and was perhaps the biggest sheep farm in New England. Brown believes that the Katahdin produces more meat, that tastes better and costs less to raise, than any of the other breeds, including the Suffolk, which is usually thought of as the premier meat breed.

“I’m convinced the Katahdin requires less attention per pound of meat raised than a Suffolk or a Southdown,” he says. “Our flock is turned out to pasture about the last of May, depending on snow cover and weather conditions. And through the Summer, with the exception of one worming, there is nothing done to those animals.

“Other purebreds don’t do as well. You have to hand feed grain to them and they just won’t live where a Katahdin will thrive and raise twin lambs.” Brown, who has spent the last ten years working with the Kahtahdins, says they don’t have to be sheared at all and they don’t have to be crotched, or sheared around their udders at lambing time. “Things like that are unheard of with the Katahdin. They are far less susceptible to foot rot too.”

The Katahdin, named after the tallest mountain in Maine, has a hair coat, like a deer. It grows a fine wool undercoat for the Winter, but sheds it in Spring when, as Charles says, “they start rubbing the fences pretty hard.”

Another plus for the Katahdin is their easy lambing qualities. They don’t need human help at birthing time. There’s no need for a shepherd to sleep out in the barn in case a ewe develops complications. “They’ll be completely unattended from about seven at night to seven in the morning at lambing time,” Charles says. ”Maybe twice a year I’ll have to help. Last year I didn’t help a one.”

How do the Katahdins stay warm in the winter without a thick coat of wool? Charles says they handle the cold even better than wool sheep. “A Katahdin will shake the snow right . off its back like a dog,” Charles says, “but a wool sheep won’t shake. It’ll stand right there with two inches of snow on its back and get wet clean through.”

That’s Lolo to the right of the rams

Charles Brown, shepherd at Piel Farm in Abbott, Maine, with a pen of Katahdin ewes. Most Katahdins are white, but because they are meant to be single purpose meat animal, color is not a factor in breeding.

And in Summer, “They have just a hair coat so the Katahdins will be out grazing when the wool sheep are lying in the shade panting.” It is this quality that is making the Katahdins popular in tropical climates. ln the late 1970’s, Heifer Project International bought more than a hundred Katahdins and introduced them to the tropics. “From what I’ve heard they are having good luck with them in Central and South America.”

What Charles likes best about the Katahdins is the taste of the meat, which he says is “just a step away from venison.” He says the dressing percentages are usually at least four to five percent better than for the wool mutton breeds, primarily because the Katahdins don’t have a heavy wool fleece. “We’ve had them dress better than 60 percent before.”

Charles says lambs resulting from a cross between Katahdins and certain other breeds can produce some unusually heavy lambs. This happened once in 1975 when a British breed known for light wool and large frame, the Wiltshire Horn, was introduced to the Katahdin breed. “That first cross gave us some remarkable animals,” Charles remembers. “We had one ram lamb that weighed 194 pounds at ten months of age, and it was raised entirely on grass.

That unusual weight was lost, however, when the lambs from this cross were bred back to the Katahdins. Today, the Katahdin has less than a quarter Wiltshire Horn blood.

The Suffolk bloodline is also present in the Katahdin, but the most prominent ancestor is the African Hair. This breed is little known today, but in the days of sailing ships, when refrigeration was nonexistent, African Hair sheep were kept on board for slaughter to provide fresh meat. At the time of the slave trade, in the 18th century, slaves and sheep were unloaded on Caribbean islands; while molasses was taken on board for shipment to New England for making rum. Rum was then shipped to Africa, by New England merchants, to buy human beings and sheep. Those sheep that made it to the Caribbean were raised by the islanders, eventually producing a strain sometimes known as Barbados Black Belly, sometimes as African Hair.

About his first attempt at developing a woolless, mutton breed of sheep, Michael Piel wrote: “Since the African Hair sheep appeared to be the most likely candidate as an outcross on our standard mutton breeds, we arranged to import three of these animals from a United States Agriculture Experiment Station in the U.S. Virgin lslands. They eventually arrived by air-cargo at Idlewild Airport in New York: two ewe lambs and one ram lamb-as delicate and fine boned as fawns. Their conformation was a world away from what I had in mind for the mutton breed of the future!

“Nevertheless, within the year we obtained a fairly respectable number of hybrid lambs by crossing these sheep with purebred individuals of several different mutton breeds. Over the next few years we bred the hybrids to each other in all conceivable combinations. Most of the offspring proved to be intermediate in type, like the F1 generation. Occasionally, however, we would get an individual with a strong tendency toward the African coat, combined with improved conformation. The high prolificacy of the African sheep seemed to be inherited by all the subsequent generations and almost all of the ewes producing twins (or more), even at less than one year of age.”

“None of these sheep would have won the blue ribbon at the state fair,” wrote Piel, “nor could they be praised for their ability to grow and finish for the market. Nevertheless, all the surplus progeny was sent to market ( at a grade of U .S. Choice) along with the regular lambs without causing comment on the part of the buyer.”

In the 1960’s and early 1970’s, Piel, through constant selection of lambs with the traits he desired, and breeding of these animals, along with meticulous record keeping, was able to improve the Katahdin breed. His death caused only a temporary setback in the process because his widow, Barbara, is interested in carrying on the work that so fascinated her husband.

“She is active in the farm,” Charles Brown says of his boss. “She is involved in selecting the lambs for breeding stock.” “We’re still developing the Katahdin,” says Brown, now sitting at his desk in the farm office. ”It’s still pretty much an experimental breed.”

On his desk there’s a new IBM minicomputer he uses “for the very complicated job of keeping track of genetics. I hope the computer will replace that file cabinet over there.” Brown keeps a file on each ewe that traces her ancestry back at least three generations and contains other information such as which ewes produced twin lambs that are gaining at least one-half pound a day.

”This year we bought four Hampshire ewes to breed to Katahdin rams,” says Charles. “Our goal is in three to four generations to breed the wool out of the offspring and retain some of the superior leg size of the Hampshire.”

Kathadin ewes

Brown says the Katahdin breed has been catching on slowly in popularity, but more New England sheep farms are giving them a try. A farmer who has raiseed them for more than five years is Paul Jepson of North Bennington, Vt. “As a commercial sheep farmer I was having trouble in the early 1970’s in securing a shearer for my flock of approximately 300 purebred and grade ewes,” said Jepson. “In addition, the low market price of wool made the raising of general purpose sheep economically unfeasible, since my income was mainly from the sale of meat.”

Jepson met Michael Piel and purchased several Katahdins “on a trial basis” and became “convinced that they were the answer to my problem. I intend to develop a large flock of these sheep and through attrition, phase out wooled sheep.” Jepson breeds and sells Katahdins today, in conjunction with Piel Farm. Another sheep farmer who has recently become interested in Katahdins is Muriel Cole of Canaan, N.H. She says they seem “ideal for the small farmer who doesn’t want the bother of shearing sheep.

“l have not found wool to pay for itself in the 12 years or so I have kept sheep,” she says. “This year it cost 50 cents a pound for shearing, and was worth 62 cents delivered to Durham. I have invested in a Katahdin ram and plan to gradually get into woolless sheep, if it works out.”

Piel Farm is primarily a breeding operation, but Charles Brown says the farm markets lambs not selected for breeding stock. A local freezer trade provides the most satisfactory market, he says, but he also moves lambs through auction barns and wholesalers lined up by the Central Maine Sheep Breeders Association.

“Local livestock auctions used to be our main outlet,” says Charles, “but this past year prices have been so low I haven’t hauled to them. Now l’m looking for new markets. One of the big problems is putting together a lot of 30 to 40 lambs that are ready to go to market at once.”

Piel Farm has 200 acres of pasture and hayfield and 700 acres of woodland. It is a highly efficient operation. Charles runs the whole farm with help from one fulltime hired hand and a couple high school students in in the Summer.

In Winter, the sheep are housed in two barns, so in case of fire or other catastrophe, the whole flock wouldn’t be lost. One barn is a long, one-story structure open on one side, with a fenced in barn yard. The other barn is an older, two story structure, which Charles hopes to replace in 1983.

Both barns have semi-automatic feed cribs that enable one man, with five hours of work, to provide the sheep with enough feed for a week. A “plow” moves back and forth on a track to keep the feed spread out.

“We use the big, round bales here,” Charles says. “We put them in a Haybuster grinder, then into a mixer wagon where we mix the hay with grain and protein supplements –whatever we need to bring their diet up to the requirements of the period we’re feeding in.

“We have very little pasture management,” he says. “Basically, we use three big fields. We take the hay off a field and then open it to grazing. The cattle eat what the sheep don’t.”

Piel Farm raises 28 head of Charolois beef cattle and pastures them alongside the sheep. “The cattle consume the extra hay when we. have it,” says Charles. “In a low hay year, we sell off cattle.”

Charles uses a 740 Allis-Chalmers tractor for mowing, baling and grinding. This is backed up by a 3020 John Deere with a front end loader. Three other smaller and older tractors are kept on hand for specialized uses. A New Holland baler makes the round bales, which are stored in a metal building that was once a saddle horse arena.

A John Deere 40 bushel manure spreader is used to cast rich sheep manure over the fields. This is done after haying, when the fields are dry. The bucket leader is driven right into the sheep pens and barns to clean them out.

The farm maintains a well-equipped mechanic’s shop, where Charles is right at home, repairing tractors and other equipment. Before he got into sheep farming, ten years ago, he was, ironically a loom fixer in the woolen mill in nearby Guilford.

On a Winter’s day, Charles’s sheepdog lies asleep on the shop floor while his master tinkers with engines or works the computer in the farm office, located in the shop building. Outside, Charles’s pickup truck is parked, and on the front seat, at all times, is a .303 caliber rifle with a long scope.

“We lose 20 to 30 sheep a year to coyotes,” he says. “l can’t prove it but that’s what I think. I shot two coyotes just this Fall. I’ve shot eight or ten over the past six or seven years.

UPDATE

Today the Katahdin breed is one of the most popular sheep breeds in the USA.