Katahdin Hair Sheep

Interested in Adding Our Unique Katahdin Sheep To Your Family?

Katahdin Hair Sheep For Sale in east of Jefferson City, Missouri

If you are considering buying a sheep to add to your family or homestead, you’ve come to the right place! While we do not sell adult animals often, we have lambs available for sale every year.
Email is the best way to reserve.We normally answer every email within 24hrs of receiving it.

Our Katahdin lambs (mainly a meat breed, but also can be used for milking)

We offer two options when purchasing our lambs. These options are:

1. Purchasing them as bottle babies
2. Holding them with a $100/head deposit until weaning.
If you intend to take home bottle lambs

While it is typically considered better for the lambs to leave them with their mother until weaning, we offer people the option to raise them as bottle babies. There are a couple of reasons we offer this option.

Some people do not have extensive sheep handling facilities set up to catch wild sheep. Bottle raised lambs become pets almost like dogs. They are typically very friendly, and extremely easy to catch and easy to handle. They can be trained to lead and tie. This may be an ideal situation for people with limited space and facilities. Additionally, if you are hoping to milk your sheep, bottle raised lambs will be much more amenable to being milked. Particularly if you handled them a lot and spent the time to train them to lead and tie as lambs.

Having very tame ewes can also make them safer to have around.

They are much less likely to panic and run or thrash if they are unfazed by you walking up to them. They won’t try to jump through you or your fence in their panic to get away. Additionally, some people with children or those who want them exclusively as pets may wish to have the experience of raising bottle lambs.

If you purchase bottle babies they will need to be fed milk replacer several times a day until the have a functional rumen and are able to eat enough solid food to sustain them. You can typically start weaning bottle lambs at about 6 weeks of age. At this point they should be chewing their cud, eating good quantities of hay and feed, and should be about 2.5x their birth weight.

You will need to feed bottle lambs 4-6 times a day. Every 2-3 hours (4-5 hours overnight) for the first few days is best, then you can gradually increase the feeding volume and decrease the number of feedings down to 2x a day. By the time they are a week old, you should also be offering them access to lamb creep feed and leafy hay or pasture. Once they are eating solid food well you can wean them. You will know they have a functional rumen and are close to being ready to wean when you start to see them chewing their cud.

We do have a few rules regarding bottle babies though. This is to ensure their well-being. We want them to thrive for you.

1. Bottle babies have to be taken within a week of them being born. This is to ensure that they will still take the bottle. Older lambs do not accept a bottle readily, but are also not ready to eat solid foods exclusively. So if they are more than a week old, you have to wait until weaning to take them home. Weaning is typically at 8 weeks of age.

2. If you have no other sheep or goats to keep them company you must purchase 2 lambs. Sheep are herd/flock animals. They CANNOT live alone and must have another sheep to keep them company.

3. PLEASE NOTE: We do not recommend raising ram lambs as bottle babies unless they will be castrated and kept as pets/for their wool. Raising ram lambs as bottle babies removes the innate respect/fear they have of humans and can make them very dangerous to be around as they get older. Unless castrated before leaving ram lambs will not be sold as bottle babies. We can castrate ram lambs prior to them leaving upon request.

If you intend to take home weaned lambs

Our lambs are typically weaned at about 8 weeks old. By that time their rumens are functional, they are chewing their cuds, and have learned how to eat from mom. They are ready to eat a diet exclusively of solid food. At this point you may offer them creep feed and hay, or good quality pasture if that is available.

If you wish to reserve lambs for pick up at weaning, we require a $100/head deposit.

We do not hold lambs without a deposit.

They are considered available for anyone to purchase until a deposit is received. We are sorry, but we cannot hold lambs based upon someone simply telling us they want one. This is unfair to our other customers because the unfortunate truth is that without committing to a deposit, too many people say they want a lamb and then do not follow through with the purchase later.

When we take your deposit on a lamb, it is not refundable if you change your mind about wanting the lamb. However, we will refund your entire deposit if something unexpected happens to the lamb and we cannot provide the agreed upon lamb (or a suitable substitute) as planned.

When we take the deposit, we will set up a tentative pick up date with you. If you cannot meet that date, please contact us as soon as possible and let us know so that we can reschedule. We expect lambs to be picked up promptly around the 8 week mark.

If lambs are not picked up within 2 weeks of the scheduled pick up date we will charge board for keeping the lamb(s). If they are not picked up within 1 month of the scheduled pick up date, we will offer them for sale to someone else, and you will forfeit your deposit.