Sheep

The beautiful vistas of Ohio’s Appalachian region delight visitors with ancient forested foothills, winding creeks, and unglaciated terrain. In the late 19th century, extraction industries like the coal industry also discovered value in this landscape, but as coal resources declined, local economies deteriorated. Today, scaling up local foods is one way these historic communities are […]

Artificial insemination (AI) has become widely popular in breeding livestock, because it allows farmers to make faster genetic improvement in their animals, enhance biosecurity, and decrease breeding related costs of production. Despite these benefits, some farmers are hesitant to use sheep breeding because sheep have a complex reproductive anatomy. Farmer Don Brown and Dr. Craig […]

Sheep and goat enterprises offer diversification opportunities for small and limited-resource farmers. Control of internal parasites is a primary concern for many sheep and goat producers and is particularly challenging in humid areas. Resistance of intestinal parasites to commercial anthelmintics (drugs that are used to treat parasitic infections), and the inability to use commercial anthelmintics […]

The Agricultural Innovation and Commercialization Center at Purdue University has developed a Comparative Decision Support toolkit online resource to assist with entry-level decision-making about small-scale livestock enterprises.   This Comparative Decision Support (CDS) toolkit provides realistic expectations across multiple livestock enterprises. It uses an individual’s input and returns customized results. In 2010, Purdue University graduate […]