I have always enjoyed sheep and their gentle nature. I knew someday "when we had the pasture to spare" we would add them to our farm. I spent time during my undergrad years at Michigan State University Sheep Farm while completing my Animal Science degree and first fell in love with sheep there. Listening to the well known Mr. George Good, the farm manager at the time, definitely sparked the interest. My interest continued to grow until finally a couple of years ago, my husband and I began our search.
We came across the beautiful and versatile Icelandic sheep fairly early on in our search and the rest his history. We were hooked to say the least and thus a beginning was born for my sheep farm. We chose our foundation animals carefully with our breeding goals in mind. Correct type, easy to handle, and healthy animals was and continues to be our goal. We maintain a smaller flock as the pasture we can devote to our sheep is limited. The majority of our farm is devoted to our dairy cows consisting of around 400+ milking Holsteins (and growing!). For this reason, we sell many beautiful lambs and adults we would typically retain in our own flock if we were not so limited on space. We also do butcher some lambs that are not destined as breeding animals in early fall, if interested in some gourmet Icelandic lamb please send us an email.
With my husband and I both coming from production animal background, we have learned not to be "farm blind" and believe that every animal we produce is worthy to go on as a breeding animal. Yes, it is difficult to be critical and honest to yourself about your own animals, particularly cute little lambs. However, lack of culling leads to problems down the road, for your own farm and your buyers.
We look at each animal as an individual, keeping our breeding goals in mind and judge that animal against our standards also keeping in mind the genetics it may carry. This quest to improve upon the breed with each of our lambs also led me to artificial insemination in sheep. In the fall of 2007, I attended a Vaginal Artificial Insemination seminar in Minnesota with fellow Icelandic sheep breeders to learn this unique method of AI first hand. We were lucky enough to have the Icelanders travel from the Southram Station in Iceland to teach the class. We plan to utilize the VAI method using frozen Icelandic ram semen shipped from Iceland. We feel that utilizing the VAI method will help bring diversity of superior genetics to our flock in addition to excellent conformation and meat traits.
Please have a look around our website and if you have questions or would like to stop by to meet us and our sheep please give us a call or send us an email. We love sharing what we have learned along the way, and are always happy to help newcomers to the breed.
Brianna & Doug Schneider
email: schneider.brianna@gmail.com
Our address:
12495 W. Lehman Rd
Westphalia, MI 48894
Our farm is enrolled in the Voluntary Scrapie Eradication program (our Farm Tag Number is MI-82) in addition we are members of the Michigan Sheep Breeders Association and the Icelandic Sheep Breeders of North America (ISBONA).
