830 SHEEP INDUSTRY OF THE UNITED STATES 



nibbling at the starting grass. Hereafter we shall keep the flock off the fields until 

 the grass has a fair start just as we find it best to do with cattle. A sheep is a 

 helpless thing when once attacked by disease, and a new-born lamb is still more so. 

 The water question, as applied to sheep in winter, is a puzzling one. Why they 

 should prefer to eat snow in winter to drinking clean cold water is more than one 

 follow can find out. Sheep are not great drinkers under any circumstances, and are 

 very fastidious about drinking a sip now and a sip then seems to please them best. 

 To accommodate them in this habit and to avoid snow eating we have conducted 

 water to the sheep barn, so that a running stream can be made to flow through it. 



The editor of the Iowa Homestead, in discussing the subject as to 

 who should keep mutton sheep, says that it is not the farmer who has 

 an unlimited amount of brush pasture and who regards sheep merely 

 as a brush browser and weed trimmer, able to live eight or ten thick, on 

 an acre of land worth $10. 



Let him beware of the mutton sheep. We do not advise him to keep any kind of 

 sheep, but if he does let him avoid the Shropshire or Oxford, and give the Cotswold 

 and Hampshire Down a very wide berth. The man who starts out to grow mutton 

 must understand first of all the lesson so hard for men to learn, that something never 

 comes for nothing, that " men do not gather grapes from thorns nor figs from thistles." 

 If large size is to be obtained there must be first a breed with an inheritance of size 

 and of wool that belongs to large mutton sheep, and second, feed and keep corre- 

 sponding to that size of type and of wool. If a farmer will not buy rams of mutton 

 size and mutton wool it is folly for him to expect mutton lambs, mutton prices, and 

 mutton profits. There must be mutton keep, corresponding to the size and corre- 

 sponding to the environment which first produced the size. There is no magic or 

 legerdemain in sheep breeding or in any other kind of stock breeding, and the sooner 

 farmers understand it the better. The man, therefore, who should keep mutton 

 sheep is not the mutton-headed farmer, but the man with a clear head, who thor- 

 oughly understands that mutton is not grown on scrub-brush farms, nor from sheep 

 springing from scavenger sheep, but on the richest pastures and from mutton sheep. 

 We do not know how we can put this subject any plainer. This is not the day of mira- 

 cles. The breeding of mutton sheep is not a game of cards, where men hope to get 

 something for nothing, nor yet a sort of bucolic bucking the tiger on Change, but a 

 legitimate business, where the beast is grown only from the best stock and by the 

 best feed and care. 



PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND OBSERVATIONS. 



A true index of the sheep industry of Iowa would not be complete 

 without an expression from the men actually engaged in it, who know 

 the difficulties they have to encounter and what is necessary to add to 

 the further success of the business of mutton and wool production, so 

 that both national and State legislatures may know the actual needs 

 and how to apply the remedy to the benefit of all concerned. These 

 experiences are especially valuable to the inexperienced flock master, 

 coming, as they do, from successful and practical men. 



W. J. Thompson, Jamaica, Guthrie County: 



Have found sheep raising more profitable than any other branch of farming. I 

 have made a yearly average of almost 100 per cent on money invested. Two years 

 ago there was hardly a sheep in this county, but now nearly all of our successful 

 farmers are turning to them; but they want sheep for mutton and wool. 



