What Sheep Do to Veld, and Choosing a Breed

#The market said produce more, and the country said no

South Africa's sheep flock has been shrinking for a generation. It stood at about 30 million head in 1990 and 21 million by 2015 (Vosloo), and it sits at roughly 21.2 million today, having declined by an average of about 3% a year over the decade to 2024 — with 2024 the first increase since 2019 (Agribook).

Read the stated reasons carefully, because they are the syllabus for this module: drought, predation, stock theft and labour intensity. Price is not on the list. The market has been telling farmers to produce more sheep for years, and farmers have been answering that they cannot — not because it does not pay, but because they cannot keep the animals alive, on their own land, with the labour they can hire.

On a sheep enterprise the production gains are small and the loss lines are enormous. Get the breed and the veld right and you improve things by percentage points. Get the predation, theft and parasite lines wrong and you lose the enterprise.

#What a sheep actually does to a sward

Sheep select — and what they select differs by breed, which has been measured here. Dorpers are less selective than Merinos, using shrubs and Karoo bushes more heavily, while Merinos concentrate on grass (Brand 2000).

That one finding carries the whole veld argument about sheep, and it runs in both directions.

There is a hard limit on how tightly you can pack small stock, and it has been measured here. On arid Karoo subshrub-grass rangeland, 16 small stock units per hectare for a single month significantly reduced basal, canopy and canopy-spread cover, with the palatable Karoo bushes declining most — but an 11-month rest allowed recovery under favourable rainfall (du Toit, Snyman & Malan 2011). Both halves belong on the same slide. Density does damage; recovery time repairs it — which is Module 3's rule about residual and recovery, arriving unchanged in a small-stock camp.

#Convert your flock properly, not with the six-to-one rule

Module 3 built the grazing ledger in Large Stock Units. Small stock is where farmers wreck it, because the shorthand everyone quotes — 1 LSU is about 6 small stock units — describes a dry mature ewe, and almost nobody runs dry mature ewes.

The class factors that work come from Meissner and are the ones the Western Cape department publishes: dry wool ewe 0.15 LSU, ewe with a lamb at foot 0.20 LSU, lamb 0.10 LSU, ram 0.19 LSU (Elsenburg). A ewe with a lamb at foot is five to the LSU, not six — a fifth of your grazing budget, and the gap opens exactly when the flock is largest.

#Two income streams, and why that is the point

A woolled or dual-purpose ewe gives you two products; a hair sheep gives you one.

Wool is a globally traded, auction-priced export commodity. More than 90% of the South African clip is exported, and more than 80% of those exports go to China (Agribook; Daily Maverick). In 2024/25 the country exported 44.3 million kg of greasy wool worth R4.44 billion, the Eastern Cape supplying 33.5% of receipts, the Free State 18% and the Western Cape 16.9%. Be careful with the ranking claims in the trade press: what is properly sourced is that after Australia, South Africa is the second-largest exporter of wool into China — a narrower claim than "second-largest wool producer", which the same source does not support.

Mutton is a domestic, largely formal-abattoir commodity sold into a price-inelastic local market.

The two do not move together. That is the whole argument. A wool cheque and a lamb cheque answer to different buyers, different currencies and different shocks, so a flock producing both carries a lower income variance than a flock producing either alone, even when the gross margin per ewe is identical. Lesson 4 prices a clip properly and Lesson 5 shows what happens when you own only one stream and it closes.

What decides the wool-or-hair choice, though, is rarely the price. It is the logistics.

#The Dohne exists because sourveld broke the Merino

That sentence is the most useful breed-origin fact in South African sheep farming, and it is confirmed in the primary source. The Dohne Merino was developed at the Dohne Research Station in the Eastern Cape by the then Department of Agriculture, "with the initial purpose to breed wool bred sheep adapted to the harsh sourveld high rainfall conditions". It became a dual-purpose breed, and an official breed society was established on 16 May 1966 (Vosloo). It now accounts for an estimated 40.6% of the South African Merino ram market.

Note what is not confirmed. The founding year and parent cross that circulate widely — a 1938 start, Peppin-type Merino ewes over German Mutton Merino rams — do not appear in that document and could not be confirmed elsewhere for this course. Teach the sourveld rationale and the 1966 date; check the rest with the breed society first.

It matters beyond trivia because it is the clearest South African demonstration that context beats genetics in the abstract. A pure Merino is a magnificent animal in the right place. On leached, high-rainfall, cold-winter sourveld she was not, and the country's response was to build a different animal rather than to feed the problem away.

#What the veld trial says, and what the feedlot trial says

This is the comparison that should settle most breed arguments, because it ran on natural veld with no supplementation. Snyman and Herselman compared Afrino, Dorper and Merino at Grootvlei and Twistkraal in the Middelburg district of the Eastern Cape, on False Upper Karoo veld type 36, set-stocked at 16 ha/LSU (SAJAS 35(2), 2005):

The Merino's wool advantage is real: 1.3 kg more clean wool per ewe, and 0.6 microns stronger. The reproductive gap is also real and it is large. On the same veld, in the same seasons, under the same management, the adapted composite weaned roughly 38 to 57 percentage points more lambs than the Merino. That is not an edge to be argued away with better management. That is a different enterprise.

Now the feedlot data, which is where most breed comparison gets quoted — and misused. Feed conversion across seven South African breed types ranged from about 3.58 kg feed per kg gain for the Dohne Merino, Dormer, Dorper and Meatmaster, to 5.63 for the Merino and 7.08 for the Namaqua Afrikaner, with the fastest growth recorded for Dohne Merino and Dormer at roughly 465 g/day (van der Merwe, Brand & Hoffman 2020).

The illegitimate reading is to treat 3.58 against 7.08 as a ranking of breeds on veld. A feedlot measures conversion of a formulated, unlimited ration in a pen — a situation in which walking, selecting, tolerating heat and getting in lamb unassisted count for nothing. Those are precisely the traits a fat-tailed indigenous breed was selected for, and precisely what the Snyman trial measured. A feedlot number tells you what happens after the animal leaves your veld, and almost nothing about what happens on it.

The legitimate reading is the surprise in the same table: the two fastest-growing breeds, the Dohne Merino and the Dormer, are dual-purpose wool breeds. The assumption that you must give up wool to get growth does not survive its own data.

#What to do before the next lesson

Convert your flock to LSU using the class factors and the physiological state the animals are actually in — not head count, not the six-to-one rule. Divide your hectares by the answer and put it beside the mapped value for your magisterial district. If those two numbers are far apart, no breed decision will fix it.

Then write down which income streams you are choosing, and be honest about whether the reason is the price or the labour. In this country it is almost always the labour.