Raising sheep can be a great choice for homesteaders. They don’t cost nearly as much and are much easier to raise compared to cows, and they are one of the most versatile livestock species around: they can give you meat, milk, wool, and other sources of income besides.
But don’t fall victim to the idea that all you need to do is let your flock trot around in the pasture for a season, then shear them and start raking in the bucks from their fleeces: it’s just not that simple!
You can make money raising sheep, and even make a good living, but you’ve got to sharpen your pencil and level up your business sense if you want to pad your bank account. Keep reading, and I’ll tell you everything you need to know about making this a profitable venture…
Ways to Make Money with Sheep Shortlist
Most people naturally think of raising sheep for wool as a money-making venture, but there are several other ways to make money with these animals besides that.
Selling Lambs
Believe it or not, the most straightforward and profitable way is by breeding and selling lambs. Typically, live lambs are sold at market for meat, or sometimes for breeding stock or as pets.
The rule of thumb is that a lamb will be sold anywhere between 3 and 5 months old with a weight of 100 to 120 lbs, though sometimes they are sold when they are older as yearling lambs.
The going price of a live lamb varies anywhere from $1 to $3 per pound on the hoof, meaning you can make anywhere from $100 to $360 per head if the market is with you.
Breeding Stock
Another good way is by selling them as breeding stock. This means selling to people who are in your shoes, in a way: people who want to start and raise their own flock!
To make money doing this, you’ll have to select and breed your own sheep for desirable traits like growth rate, meat and wool quality, prolificacy in lambing, and achievements in competitions.
The price can vary considerably depending on whether or not such sheep are registered and their characteristics, but ewes can sell anywhere from $200 to $2,000, with rams going for $500 to more than $4,000.
Stud Services
Sometimes flock owners already have females of their own and just need an injection, literally, of new and desirable genetics to jump-start their own breeding program or expand their flock.
If you own a high-quality or, even better, championship ram, you can literally rent him out to breed the ewes of other owners.
Depending on the circumstances, you might be able to charge per head, meaning per ewe inseminated, or charge a flat fee to let your ram stay with the customer’s flock for a time.
Wool
As mentioned, this is the most obvious path to monetization when homesteaders think of making money with sheep.
Wool is a valuable and perennially popular textile, and you can sell either raw, freshly shorn fleeces to cooperatives, wholesalers, or end users, or process the fleeces yourself or have them processed into products like roving or yarn for subsequent sale.
The profitability of wool varies dramatically depending on market forces, buyer, quality, and a host of other factors: as a rough rule of thumb, a fleece will sell anywhere from 5 cents to 50 cents a pound.
Meat
Lamb and mutton are some of the most popular meats eaten around the world, but that’s not the case in North America. Typically, you’ll only see lamb advertised…
It’s possible to raise, slaughter, and process your sheep for selling directly to consumers, local restaurants, or wholesalers in the form of whole, half, or quarter carcasses, or finished cuts if you want to go that far.
Again, market factors are a huge influence on your price, but expect to get anywhere from $3 to $6 per pound of hanging weight selling wholesale to restaurants and butchers. Somewhat more than that when selling directly to consumers.
Milk
Your final option for monetizing your sheep is through the sale of milk. Regrettably, in the US sheep milk is even less popular than goat’s milk, though you can process it into dairy products like cheese and yogurt or hygiene and beauty products like soap.
Prices on products vary wildly, but finding a niche purchaser of your premium products can be very lucrative. Wholesale prices on fluid milk are anywhere from $1.50 to $3 per pound, and buyers are hardly guaranteed.
Keep in mind that the selling of both milk and meat is subject to a slew of local, state, and federal laws which can help or hurt your quest for profit.
Startup and Ongoing Costs
There’s an old saying that says if you watch your expenses, your profit will take care of itself. I don’t know if that’s true, but buying a flock of sheep with no expectations of what it’s actually going to cost to raise them is a surefire way to wind up in the poor house.
Consider the following startup and ongoing expenses before you even think of bringing home your first precious baby lamb:
Land: Sheep require space, and that means land. You can rent or lease land, or just pasture, but you are usually better off buying your land unless you can lock in favorable terms on a lease. Plan on at least a half acre per adult sheep for grazing.
Cost in the United States, once again, is hugely variable; it might cost you anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 an acre or even more. Don’t forget property taxes and administrative costs of development, zoning, and more.
Fencing, Electric: Sheep are hardly the hardest livestock animals to contain, but you still have to have fences around the entirety of your property, or they will get out.
You can go with traditional fencing options like woven wire, something that will run you anywhere from $1 to $5 a linear foot, or my preference, electric fencing. The latter will run you anywhere from 25 cents to $1, or a little more, per linear foot.
Make sure you plan on additional fencing expenses for temporary enclosures, paddocks, and the like.
Flock: If you want to raise sheep, you’ll need sheep! For ewes of modest quality from reputable shepherds or small-time breeders, expect to spend anywhere from $200 to $500 a head. Rams, if you want one, will go anywhere from $500 to $1,500.
If you want to buy from a prestigious breeder with registered stock, those prices may quadruple depending on the quality of the animal and lineage. If you want to raise your flock from lambs, expect to spend between $100 and $200 a head.
Feed: With luck and good land, sheep can get most of their food from grazing. At any rate, you must budget for supplemental food in times of shortage or scarcity or to meet intensive nutritional demands.
Grain will run you anywhere from 10 cents to 25 cents a pound, highly dependent on local markets, and sheep also need mineral supplements periodically for optimum nutrition.
Commercial mineral supplements run anywhere from $20 to $50 for a 50-pound bag. In total, an adult sheep will eat anywhere from 2% to 4% of its body weight daily in dry matter, depending on whether or not it is growing, pregnant, currently lactating, or in rut.
Hay: Sheep typically rely on hay for food in the wintertime, or you can feed it to them if they are kept confined and not allowed to graze for whatever reason.
Depending on where you live, hay can run you anywhere from $3 to $10 for a small bale, or $50 to $110 for a large round bale.
Use the same guidelines above for feeding during warm weather, or plan on an adult sheep needing about a quarter ton of hay for food during a typical winter if you live in a temperate area.
Healthcare: Hoping for the best that your sheep stay healthy is not a strategy for profit. Sheep need vaccinations, something that will cost you anywhere from $1 to $5 per dose.
Good shepherds will give their animals an annual checkup at the least, which will set you back about $100, maybe more, from a good farm vet and then potentially a small charge per head on top of that.
Emergency health care can be phenomenally expensive: prices will start at around $500 and can easily go up from there unless it’s a false alarm.
Deworming Treatments: One part of healthcare that you can take care of yourself is deworming treatment or ongoing worm preventative treatment.
Bought in large quantities and administered as a “drench” or liquid, these treatments might run you as little as $2 or as much as $8 per sheep per year, depending on the parasite load and infestation level in your area.
Shearing: Even if you aren’t raising your sheep for wool, they will need to be sheared unless they are a hair breed or one of the few that naturally drops their fleeces seasonally.
Shearing costs vary quite a bit, with pros charging anywhere from $3 to $10 per head after a fixed fee of $100 to $150 per visit. This is something you can learn to do yourself, and maybe you should, but we will talk about that later.
If you want to go that route, you’ll need between $200 and $500 for clippers and all the other related equipment.
Hidden Costs: Time and Opportunity
Two expenses that we can’t put a cost on are your time and opportunity. Again, lots of people have the notion when first starting out that they can just turn their sheep out onto an empty plot of land and they will take care of themselves. That just isn’t the case, at least not all the time…
No matter what the size of your flock, expect to spend anywhere from half an hour to 2 hours a day taking care of chores directly related to them.
This could be feeding and watering, administering medications, giving them checkups, walking the fences, or anything else. During lambing and shearing season, your time commitment will go way up.
If you are stuck with a bottle baby, that’s a lamb that cannot latch or is rejected by its mother, you’ll be spending many hours a day feeding the little thing until it starts eating solid food.
All this time you spend taking care of your sheep is time that you can’t spend working on other profitable things—that’s opportunity cost. Similarly, land that is devoted to grazing can’t be put to any other profitable use like growing crops.
There are countless variables for each of these expenses, way too many to go over here, but you’d be wise to carefully assess your time, your goals, your resources, and your other opportunities before you commit to keeping sheep for any purpose.
How Much Does it Cost to Keep a Single Sheep for a Year?
Factoring in all of the costs above, at an average, you should expect to spend anywhere from $175 on the low side to $425 on the high side to care for a single adult sheep per year.
This does not include the cost of acquisition or birthing the sheep yourself, and it assumes there are no major medical catastrophes you have to deal with.
You can use these figures as guidelines to do some back-of-the-napkin math for anticipated income with the following profitable activities.
However, I urge you to be a good bookkeeper and track your specific expenses from year to year so you know exactly what you can expect.
Example Profit and Loss Selling Lambs, Wool, and Stud Services
Okay, let’s put everything together. Let’s say you have a modest flock of 20 sheep, including 19 ewes and one good ram you use for breeding. This is a fairly modest flock that a skilled homesteader could be expected to manage by their lonesome or with a little help.
With this flock, you plan on selling lambs yearly, selling their wool from shearing, and if all goes well, selling stud services to other shepherds like you.
Let’s take a look at the low side and high side expected income, and compare that to nominal ongoing costs for keeping your flock. This will let us see what we can expect in terms of profit for a normal year.
The big moneymakers, typically, are the lambs. If your girls aren’t highly productive, you’re giving them a break or you’ve got any problems with the survival rate of your lambs, you could expect to get about 20 babies out of a flock this size. Selling them at $100 a head, you would gross $2,000.
A better example with mostly productive moms and healthy babies would be 40 lambs, roughly two per adult. Selling at the same price, that would get you $4,000.
Let’s use that same number of lambs, but say you were able to get a very good, but not amazing, price for them at $200 a head. With 20 lambs that would make $4,000, or $8,000 if you sold 40 of them. Not bad!
Now let’s look at the fleeces. There’s lots of variability in fleece production depending on the individual sheep, their breed, age, health, and so forth, but a good rule of thumb is to expect an adult sheep to produce about 8 lbs worth of fleece per year.
When the market is down, or if you don’t have any interested buyers in your area, you might only be able to sell that fleece for 30 cents a pound.
Shearing 20 sheep, getting 8 lbs per head, that would only give you $48 for wool. In a fairly good market, you’ll be able to get about $1.50 per pound of fleece. In the same example with the same sheep, that would equal $240 worth of wool.
But then we’ve got to look at the stud services we considered. If you have a ram in the prime of life, healthy, and a good example of the breed but not otherwise remarkable, registered, or from a vaunted pedigree, you might be able to stud him out to other shepherds for about $75 per ewe that he fertilizes.
If he does 40 ewes in a single year, that’s an extra three grand!
But let’s say you have a truly primo ram. He’s not a world-class specimen, but he’s pedigreed, papered, and pretty exceptional as far as sheep go in your area.
It isn’t out of the question you might be able to get $150 per ewe when studding him out. That would net you a cool $6,000 for his services if he gets with 40 ladies. Impressive!
Let’s look at our total income in these scenarios:
On the low side, you would gross $5,048 between the selling of lambs, fleece, and stud services.
On the high side, you would gross $10,240 for the same.
A major difference! But don’t jump for joy just yet because we have to calculate our expenses. Using the figures I gave you earlier regarding caring for an adult sheep, you’ll be spending between $175 per head and $425 per head for the adults in your flock. That comes out to between $3,500 and $8,500. Ouch!
And you’ve got to consider the price of shearing also if you aren’t doing it yourself. Hiring a local that’s willing to help you out with a nominal fee per head of just $3, this might run you $60. That would completely erase your profit if you’re only selling your fleeces for 30 cents a pound!
However, if you’re hiring a real pro that charges a call-out fee and $5 per head, you’ll be looking at $200.
On the low side, your expenses for the year will be $3,560. On the high side, $8,740. I like to add 10% to these totals for unexpected things that pop up, extra food for lambs and things like that. That brings our low side expenses to $3,900, rounding just a little bit, and our high side expenses to $9,625.
Let’s look at the spreads below:
$5,048 (gross from lambs, wool, stud serv.)
-$3,900 (lower range of expenses)
———-
$1,148 Net income (before taxes, startup costs, etc.)
Okay, you’ve at least got something to show for all your hard work, but has all of it been worth your time? Most folks I know would say “no.”
$5,048 (gross from lambs, wool, stud serv.)
-$9,625 (higher range of expenses)
———-
-$4,577 net loss!
Oof! Talk about a punch in the gut. Poor purchase prices, poor performance, and huge upkeep and expense overruns have sent you shooting into the red this season. Feed costs especially can make or break your operation.
$10,240 (gross income from lambs, wool, and stud services at better prices)
-$3,900 (lower range of expenses)
———-
$6,340 net income (before taxes, startup costs, etc.)
Now here’s a nice tidy profit, and one that is certainly livable if we can scale it. Boosting profit while keeping expenses low is the name of the game in any venture, raising sheep included.
$10,240 (gross income from lambs, wool, and stud services at better prices)
-$9,625 (higher range of expenses)
———-
$615 Net income (before taxes, startup costs, etc.)
Ugh, here’s another example that will make a shepherd sick; despite making good money off of our sheep, and their products and services, big expenses have once again chewed away any actual profit we might have received. Usually, this is avoidable if you are a sharp businessman – but sometimes it isn’t!
Should You Do Everything “In-House” or Outsource?
One of the most common questions I field when it comes to raising sheep. It’s hard to say, and it’s really a matter of understanding how much your time is worth…
For instance, when it comes to shearing your sheep, unless you are getting huge value out of the fleeces, taking the time to learn how to do it yourself or paying someone even a nominal fee to do it is likely going to eat your profit up entirely. But your sheep still have to be sheared regardless.
In that case, you might want to dedicate a day or two to doing it and then do it yourself, just treating it like a chore. But if you have lots of other things to do, you might save money on the back end by paying someone to free up your time.
The same thing goes when it comes to veterinary care. Getting nickeled-and-dimed for administering boluses, supplements, vaccines, and things like that will rack up a serious cost, as will usual livestock management practices like neutering.
Outside of major emergencies, you can do most things yourself if you’ve got the willpower and the stomach for it.
In short, if anything you are doing with your sheep is taking you away from more profitable or more critical activities, you should outsource it. If time is the one resource you have plenty of, do it yourself.
What Are the Most Profitable Sheep Breeds?
Really quick, don’t forget that your choice of breed makes a big difference in your outcomes, depending on what you want out of your sheep.
If you want to sell tons of lambs, breeds like Romanovs or Finnsheep are going to be your best bets. East Friesians are known for exceptional milk production and quality.
When it comes to wool, both the quality and the yield, it’s hard to do better than Merinos or Rambouillets. And remember that many breeds have a combination of desirable characteristics, allowing you to optimize your operation.
