Sheep at Navall Farm are grown for fresh Ontario Lamb. We have about 130
ewes, most of these are North Country Cheviot and North Country Cheviot crosses.
For some time we obtained our ewe flock by crossing North Country ewes with Border Leicester rams to give us the
a higher lambing percentage.
Over the last 21 years we have experimented with a variety of different breeds
as sires for crossbreds or as terminal sires. We always try to breed crossed
back to a North Country ram so that all of our animals have at least a strong
North Country Cheviot background. This year we used a dorper and also a North
Country Cheviot ram. At the same time we still breed back to a North Country
ram to keep that percentage high. 
We
do have a few commercial ewes or ewelambs for sale every year. Dorpers were
developed in South Africa as a very frugal sheep with good growth rate and
little wool that is shed. They were obtained by crossing Persian with Dorsets.
We are grass farmers that sell our grass
in the form of lambs. Contrary to some reports the lambs so produced are of excellent
taste and quite lean. What is more we know what our animals consume. We do not
ever feed our sheep a pelleted ration, that can contain pretty much anything,
rather we supplement their feed with locally grown whole grain and roasted soybeans.
We supplement our ewes with this during gestation and lactation.
During the grazing season we pasture our sheep on small strips of pasture in a system called rotational grazing.
Generally the sheep will stay on one strip for only two or three days then they are moved on to the next strip.
Each strip has about 35 days for recovery between grazings. Our pasture consists largely of birdsfoot trefoil,
white clover, tall fescue, some timothy, some orchard grass.
To protect our sheep from predation we now use a Great Pyrenees, called "Ara".
She lives with the sheep year round. Previous to Ara we tried a guard donkey with unfortunately very mixed results:
he would protect all the sheep that were relatively close to him but he was quite aggressive towards my two young
sons, biting one quite severely plus he was a real pain to move from rotation to rotation.
The most important ingredient in our sheep operation are our border collies: they move the sheep from pasture to
pasture, from pasture to barn, they seperate out sick sheep, they hold sheep to us so that we can catch them and
treat them. Our operation could not function without these tireless border collies.
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Farm Border Collies Lambing Slideshow
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