Royal White®Sheep are of the hair class of ovine. They were developed and selected for high performance, adaptability, easy care, flocking ability, low stress, non-flightiness, parasite resistance and height to weight proportional frames for better lamb carrying capacity, better meat distribution throughout the body and better browsing attributes. Udders are nicely placed above the ground. They are all hair, highly intelligent for sheep, the ewes excel in mothering ability and protection of their lambs. Hair lambs are cleaned up by mothers fast at birth as compared to other types of ovine, a major plus for lamb survivability, particularly with multiple lambs. Royals can breed year around, thus allowing lamb production to meet certain specific markets at various times of the year. Rams are white faced and frames well above the ground for less effect from heat off the soil and less solar heat to the affecting grazing and possibly breeding.

Both sexes are polled, they prefer routine.  Rams are protective as well. Flocking traits enable easier management for producers and allow rotational grazing to be more effective, as they stay close together while grazing versus going off grazing in small groups. Royals are somewhat docile, but not too docile, they are non jumpers. They adapt quickly to new environments and ship with low stress.  Newborn lambs show high glucose and Iga levels at 36H post partum per Texas Tech University.  Figure 54% meat yields at 109 pounds off range type grazing. Meat is tender and lean, 2.1 on the Bratzler Shear Force Instrument.  The pelts are splittable and grade as garment quality leather.

Hair sheep production has increased over the past 50 years and continues to do so, reasoning include out of season breeding, easycare, no shearing, no docking, no crutching, demand by the emerging ethnic markets.

People that are interested in raising the Royals include cattle operators, hog operators, goat producers and sheep producers desiring to diversify, baby boomers' retiring, feedlot operators, orchard growers.  Hair is a hollow fiber.  Wool is a solid fiber.

My philosophy in developing the Royal White® was fairly simple, keep the animal pure with the best consistent positive traits I wanted in them for continued performance and culling out undesirable traits in them.  I figured infusing unintentional traits and potentially diluting the traits already in them wasn't the way to go for the long term. Many large retailers have complained about the inconsistency in the lamb meat  purchased by their consumers in the past. Heard of problems down the road like with breeds that were once capable of breeding out of season that were crossbred for show lambs offspring, the offspring were incapable of out of season breeding missing todays emerging market demand.Dilution of higher parasite resistant traits is another concern in so called upgrading. So we don't allow upgrading for registration purposes.  Consistency in performance genetically and the phenotype is key.

Regards,

Bill Hoag