Fact About Sheep Wool

Video Transcript

Alright, so the most common thing people know about sheep is wool. Wool is a product of breeding. We have bred sheep for thousands and thousands of years to produce a very thick furry undercoat. We've actually bred them. They don't even have an outer coat of guard hairs anymore. All they have is this thick undercoat and this is wool. You can see the difference on this sheep if you look carefully at the nose and even the ear, this is hair. This doesn't grow the same. This is wool. This is what gets trimmed off usually once a year. Some people might shave their sheep twice a year but here at Drumlin we trim once a year and we do it early in the Spring and that produces a whole fleece. Now a full sized ewe, such as this one over here that is looking at us, this is a lamb and they are this year's lamb so they are fairly small. This coat the first time it is cut will be softer than a mature ewe. But a ewe will give you a fleece that will weigh anywhere from, I would estimate 7 to 10 pounds. However, a good 30 t0 40 percent of that will be taken out when it is cleaned. Thirty to 40 percent of that believe or not is dirt, vegetable matter and lanolin. If you remember lanolin from old hand creams, it is hardly used anymore because it doesn't have especially long shelf life. The lanolin comes from a sheep. It is what helps keep them waterproof. So this wool will be trimmed off in March and each sheep again, produces 7 to 10 pounds of wool, will give us probably from 4 to 5 pounds of clean usable wool per sheep.

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