A Sheep Auction

As I drove to St. Paul on Friday with my load of chickens, I noticed a sign at the auction mart that stated there was a sheep auction that day. Instead of waiting around inside the truck for 5 hours for the birds to be processed, I decided to attend the auction. Cindy and I have been spending a good amount of time researching sheep and are planning on acquiring a few sometime soon. The lamb meat market is good now, and with a booth at a farmers market next year, we should be able to do well with our pork, chicken, beef and lamb sales. There was not a strong turnout of sheep at the sale. The roads were not good and I think that turned off a lot of people from attending. I missed out on bidding on a couple nice ewes, but thats ok. We will keep looking and find what we want in time. The thing we like about sheep is that they are a little more gentle on the fences and safer for the kids. It should be noted that the prices at the auction were fairly steady. Ewes of any age were going at $1.20 - $1.40 per pound and Rams, nice or otherwise were around $.60 a pound. There were a couple of buyers that bought most of the stock. I assume that they were feedlot operators. Most of the groups were in numbers that were too large for me to consider. It would of been nice to be able to pick out a few nice ewes instead of buying an entire "flock".