Good Meat Sheep Crosses?

Hey all. Does anyone here have experience with crossing meat sheep breeds? If you do, what breeds have you worked with? Any crosses you'd particularly recommend, or that you thought did really badly?

The best bet for my area in terms of environmental tolerance is the Barbados Blackbelly, but they can take nine months to reach butcher weight, so I was thinking of crossing them with a faster maturing ram. In theory, I should get faster maturing lambs that have the resilience of hybrid vigor as well. Since I'm only planning to butcher the lambs, I'm not at all concerned about keeping the flock certified aside from the breeding stock themselves. Right now, I'm leaning toward either St. Croix for the ram, since there's a farm in my area that keeps them, or Suffolk, which might also make for broader lambs.

My sheep flock consists of Barbados black belly crossed with St Croix, katahdin, and dorper. The dorper crosses seem to have more problems with internal parasites, but they are faster growing and meatier. I’ve gradually switched back to adding more Barbados blackbelly into the flock (I recently added a new ram) because we think that the black belly influence makes for nicer tasting meat.

Why use so many different breeds? Simple—- availability.  I’m fairly remote and don’t have much choice of breeds here. Getting a purebred is difficult and expensive.  I can buy a mix lamb for $50, but a purebred could cost $350 plus.

When I was in Wales there were a few standard crosses depending on what part of the farm the sheep were kept.

On the top of the hills the ewes would be be purebred mountain breeds, mostly Welsh Mountain or Beulah Speckle Face.

Sometimes they would have a pure-bred ram of the same breed running them to breed replacement pure bred breeding stock, and sometimes they would have a Kerry Hill ram running with them. These were bigger, chunkier sheep then the mountain breeds, and had a better quality fleece. We used to breed them because there was a ready market for the ram lambs as breeding stock, but we stopped when we realised how in-bred they were and how dependent they seemed to be on vaccinations to keep them alive. They outcrossed beautifully though and the half-bred ewes would do very well on the lower slopes of the mountains while the ram lambs fattened better than the pure mountain breeds.

Then a Suffolk ram would be run with those ewes to produce lambs that would fatten up even better and have a heavier finishing weight.

Where are you located?

Context: North-central North Carolina, almost to the Virginia border. We're very hilly, but don't quite qualify as foothills. The soil here is solid clay with occasional large quartz rocks. That nutrient-dense clay soil grows great pasture winter/spring/fall, but every year when it gets hot in the summer the clay turns into brick and we have a hard time keeping pasture alive - so foraging ability is pretty important in our livestock, and we go for the most heat tolerant breeds we can find. For sheep that of course means hair sheep. By 'hot' I mean that we regularly get temps in the range of 95F-105F (35C-40.5C) in July and August, and if there's a hurricane going on down south, we have very high humidity even if the rain doesn't reach us. Because of all that intensity we are looking at transitioning our land into silvopasture so that there's more shade for the animals and soil.