Here’s an article on sheep being used as “lawnmowers”. Any downsides they might have missed? I’m thinking of using them on my 3 acres in Hawaii.
Imagine owning a lawnmower that makes its own blades, moves itself around the lawn, requires no gasoline (it runs on grass), makes very little noise, replaces itself every year or so, and you can eat it as a delicious high protein food. All you need to provide is a fence around the lawn, a small shed, some water, and mineral supplements. Sound like a crazy fantasy? If you have some land with grass on it, and you can afford to put a fence around it, tropical hair sheep are a viable option.
Some people actually like to walk around and do stuff on their lawn, or don’t care to maintain sheep. Could be both. If all you want is turf you don’t have to care for, I think you’re better off with artificial turf than sheep.
You aren’t the first person to think of that by many hundreds of years. Sheep do make good lawn mowers but not all people want to be amateur farmers and would spend more money having the sheep than they would having the lawn professionally cut by a landscaping service. If you like holistic land management, they can be great but they require a lot more upkeep and hassle than a new low-end John Deere lawn tractor. A lot of people don’t have a .22 handy to pop one in the head when the time comes and Americans don’t eat mutton as a general rule so you have to slaughter them when they are their most precious to get good meat.
Don’t get me wrong, it is a great idea for some people but you have to be willing to deal with the whole life-cycle to make something like this work including having them sheared and dealing with predators plus finding a way to use the manure. Sheep are about the dumbest mammals ever invented as well (intelligent design my ass). You may need a trained border collie just to keep them in-line and that brings on some serious cost and challenges of its own. Their pens smell like shit as well (literally).
You don’t need to single out sheep. There are a bunch of things like that some people could do but just don’t want to because they don’t want to run a small-scale farm. It is hard work that requires lots of knowledge and hassle plus expense. They aren’t just cheap lawnmowers with meat benefits.
I personally prefer goats. They will eat your rose bushes and everything else and they are almost as dumb but they have personality and personality goes a long way. I miss William, the dumb brown goat who watched Wonder Woman with me on the couch when I was little. Try getting a sheep to do that. It would just stare blankly at the lawn scenes and never look up to notice the cleavage.
Also, sheep are amazingly stupid animals. I had a friend in the UK who was studying to be a vet. She said that sheep are so stupid, they don’t even recognize their own lambs after they’re born, so the farmers have to make sure that the lambs get to know who their parents are. After one birthing session, my friend was relieved to see mama sheep purposefully walking towards her newborn lamb.
It seems like a good idea, but I can’t imagine it being less time consuming or expensive to care for a half dozen sheep than to mow three acres yourself.
They are noisy, smelly and eat everything, even the stuff you don’t want them to. If you have anything nice growing, you need to fence it off. Also, a .22 ain’t the right way to put a sheep down. Ask me how I know this…
And have you ever put up 3 acres of fence? Or paid for it? Makes a lawnmower and gas seem cheap. Ever shear a sheep?
Did I mention the noise and smell?
Those are a couple downsides. But they do eat the weeds efficiently. We take two from the main pen and stick em in a 6 x 6 enclosure and we move it 2 or 3 times a day. Wipe them weeds out. But it takes a long time to cover 2 acres like this.
I heard somewhere that sheep eat the roots of the grass, making it necessary to reseed your lawn. Isn’t that why the cattle ranchers shot and killed the sheep herders on the range, back in the 1800’s?
Imho, think about it like this: would you use a dog as a garbage disposal? It’s cheaper, takes care of itself, and uses less energy. It probably also lasts longer. But, as you can imagine, there are many other things you have to do to properly take care of a dog. In the long run, even though you pay more for the garbage disposal up front, you’ll spend less.
But, for 3 acres of grassland, I can see how you would want to avoid using a lawnmower. But, would it really be necessary to cut the grass as though it were a lawn?
I know nothing about sheep as such, but my father-in-law keeps goats. He spends a lot of effort on them - it definitely wouldn’t be worth it if he didn’t also enjoy it. Ostensibly they’re kept for meat - in fact, their life is more like “pets which, tangentially, also happen to get eaten in the end”. I don’t know if they would stay healthy on a diet of just grass, but in fact they get oats every day too, morning and night. When my inlaws are out of town, they always get a neighbor to look after the goats, and feed them.
They don’t get sick very often, but they do sometimes. Also they sometimes get stuck in things and hurt themselves and need to be rescued. A former goat strangled herself to death on a length of chain while struggling to get unstuck from a bush. Goats are smarter than sheep, but still fairly stupid. They need an electric fence to keep them out of the veggie garden, and they ringbark any tree that’s within the goat area and eat their leaves to a height of five feet or so.
WARNING: PEOPLE WITHOUT STRONG STOMACHS MAY WANT TO STOP READING HERE.
My father-in-law slaughters his goats himself, with his rifle, and butchers them. I have helped him dismember a goat one time. Skinning and jointing a goat is a surprisingly skilled task - you have to get it done while the goat is still warm, or the fat congeals making the skin ten times harder to get off. Also it smells. There are stomach contents to be dealt with (both ends) and you need a pretty sharp knife to hack the various inside bits apart. Also a nice big freezer.
One plus to goats (in our situation) - they are a great small-child fascinator. Last time we visited the in-laws we barely saw our eldest daughter for three days (now that she can get in and out of the paddock by herself). And they do keep the grass short. They don’t eat all the weeds though - my father-in-law still has to dig cape-weed out of the paddock with a mattock. (And THEN they eat it - go figure)
