Ewe A Day - Persia

Well, It took a while, but here is the last ewe in the annual Ewe A Day posts.

Sheltering Pines Persia is another one of my favorite ewes. She has a great fleece and excellent conformation. Overall, she ranks very high on our ewe scale. She's one that I think stands out in our flock, but at the same time, is highly improvable. She has an incredibly beautiful blue fleece. It is very nice! Her markings are also very nice, but her strength is probably her conformation.

Persia is out of Justalit'l Too Unique and Sheltering Pines Starry Night. She has some nice relatives as well. She has Bartok on both sides and is an F3 Minder.

After reviewing the entire ewe flock this year, it has become clear that it will be tough to part with any of them, which is going to make choices very difficult this spring. You always expect lambs to be better than their mother, but the reality is that it doesn't always go that way. In fact, most of the time it doesn't play out that way. I'll post breeding groups next, but all of our groups targeted fleece improvement. That was a challenge because that meant sacrificing spots and moorits. This is the first year that we really didn't breed for those things, because, quite frankly, we just didn't find the correct combination of conformation and fleece in a spotted moorit ram.

There are always constraints that you have to deal with in a breeding program, but I didn't feel like we needed to take a step back in the fleece and conformation departments just to produce flashy spots or moorit. We still hope to get plenty of both, but it wasn't a focus, and I remain convinced it was the right thing to do.

At any rate, I'm very happy with our ewe flock right now. I wouldn't necessarily say that any of them have everything, but they all bring something important in our main areas of focus.