Author Topic: fleece like cardboard (Read 1920 times)

feldar · « **on:** July 04, 2011, 10:53:45 am »

Ok a question for fleece people, i am very ignorant on this topic. Can you tell me why this year some of my younger ewes had particuarly greasy fleeces. One had so much lanolin and dark grease that it actually felt like cardboard. Only the shearling ewes appear to be affected and the shearer found these really hard to shear.
Is it because we had such a hard winter last year?

ellisr · « **Reply #1 on:** July 04, 2011, 12:10:34 pm »

I have had fleece issues and I put it down to the winter as we had the obvious prolonged cold but also a lot of rain. My shearlings come out ok but I had 2 year olds that had awful issues with fleece.

Fleecewife · « **Reply #2 on:** July 05, 2011, 11:36:44 am »

No problems here in the south of Scotland

Dougal · « **Reply #3 on:** July 06, 2011, 02:40:16 pm »

What breed are you using? some short wooled breeds, like suffolks or texels can suffer from dermititis on their backs which makes them much tougher to clip. Also the weather hasn.t helped. Hot days in april but still cold at night followed by a cool wet May has meant that the grease can be very very hard and dark in the fleeces this year. I wouldn't worry overly, if the wool is off them they'll go on and thrive now.

Anke · « **Reply #4 on:** July 06, 2011, 04:32:46 pm »

Some of my shetlands have had a break in the fleece, I am still working through the fleeces to see how many are affected. It doesn't seem to be all, and not confined to the ewes only either. But we have had a particularly hard winter, and mine do not have much shelter and the haylage was not top quality either. They were tupped in the really bad spell in late November... (but all delivered their - mainly twin - lambs, by themselves and I didn't loose any lambs/ewes this year (so far), so maybe that's what is important)

But they were very easy to shear in late May, wool was definitely rising.