S Jull

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.

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.