Evaluating 2021 Rams

I am trying to decide which ram lambs to keep. OR should I keep any of them? I wish I had enough land to keep several for a year to see how they look when the grow up. In my situation it is not realistic to keep more than a couple. Even that may not make sense when I still have their sires still here as well.

I caught most of the 4-horn ram lambs yesterday so I could take a better look at them and take photos to send to a potential buyer. I thought you, my faithful readers, might be interested.

This one (2126 Ruby Peak Tamarisk x Meridian Terri) is on my cull list because I don’t like his horns He may have nice wool, nice a good balance of color throughout his body, all the correct face markings, etc, but there are so many things to try and get right with this breed, and the horns are a major one. Those horns are tipping forward. They may never be bad enough to cause him harm, but they are certainly not attractive.

This one (2130 Ruby Peak Tamarisk x Meridian Jingle) certainly has better positioned horns and he has nice fleece.

This ram is 2137, Meridian Rambler x Meridian Patsy. I like his sire’s wool and I think it was passed down to this ram. In this view it almost looks as though his horns are slightly forward but the tips are going back and I hope the horns continue that way. I’m tempted to keep this one to see how he grows. His sire, Rambler, is one of two rams I have sired by Jasper who was sold this spring. Rambler had just enough color to be registered and this guy is also on the light side. He also has a pink nose which is not as desirable. But take a look at that wool.

Lamb 2148 (Ruby Peak Tamarisk x Meridian Janna) is a decent looking ram with good markings and nice wool, but what about his horns?

Broken horns will grow back but I don’t know for sure how they will look. Will that lower right horn curl out of the way of the jaw or grow right into it?

I had high hopes for 2151 (Ruby Peak Tamarisk x Meridian Honey) because Honey has such great wool. Strike 1 - lower horns growing in towards the jaw on both side.

Strike 2 - freckling. This makes for a pretty fleece, but a Jacob sheep is supposed to have large spots. Freckles are different and they increase in number as the sheep gets older. Its one thing to have a freckled ewe, but a ram will pass that trait on to many offspring and change the look of the whole flock. Notice that the freckled fiber doesn’t show up at the tips of the fleece. You can’t see freckles when a lamb is born. I think it’s in the secondary follicles that mature only after the lamb is born, so freckles may surprise you when you look at a lamb that is a couple of months old and only starting to show the trait.

Ram 2156 (Ruby Peak Tamarisk x Meridian Lavendar) Where are those lower horns headed?

This guy’s wool is OK and well within the breed standard, but it doesn’t have the visual appeal of those others. This one was also a bit shorter. On the plus side for this ram, his dam is lilac (the brownish-gray color pattern in Jacob sheep) so if bred to a lilac ewe would be expected to produce lilac lambs 50% of the time.

I just looked back at a blog post I wrote 2 weeks ago. Many of these rams are in photos there too. You can check out the changes.

Farm Club members are coming next Saturday. We’ll probably catch these all again and evaluate them further. We’ll catch the two horn rams also and make some decisions about them.