Raising Sheep for Meat: Official Cost Breakdown

Although buying lamb at the supermarket can be quite expensive, raising sheep for meat is one of the easiest and most affordable ways to grow your own meat! 

This year we raised six lambs for meat on a rented pasture. This is a breakdown of all our costs for the year. 

 

Raising Sheep for Meat

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We are actually very limited on what we can do on our current rental property. We have limits on how many animals we can have, fencing that is falling over, and a pasture full of sagebrush and rocks rather than grass. In spite of all that, we still were able to raise much of our own meat this year. 

We did it by growing chickens on our own property and renting a small pasture for the sheep. We ended up sharing the pasture with a friend who also has sheep and splitting the cost, so our total pasture rent was just $25 per month!

 

Cost Breakdown

• 6 lambs at $50 each = $300

• Pasture rent 6 months at $25 = $150

• Shearing $60

Total $510

 

We found pasture on a bulletin board at our local grocery store. It was 2 ½ irrigated acres with a creek and some trees for shelter. The grass supported our 6 lambs plus 20 of our friends for the entire summer.

We had to shop around a bit to find lambs at an affordable price. Some were $150-$200, but we finally found some younger ones for $50 each. We brought them home at a little over a month of age. The smaller sheep were easy to transport in the back of an SUV and much more affordable. Older lambs would have yielded a bit more meat in the fall, but probably not enough to justify spending three times as much.

Our sheep did not have to be sheared before butchering, but we chose to do so because we didn’t want their beautiful wool to go to waste.

 

Raising Icelandic Sheep for Meat

As far as raising sheep for meat goes, we haven’t found a breed yet that we didn’t like, but when it comes to raising our own, Icelandic are our preference. 

The pictures in this article show a mixed flock of Icelandic and Friesian lambs. The Icelandic have a more concave face shape and most have small horns. Their wool gets much longer than the Friesian, often dragging on the ground by late summer. Both breeds are dual-purpose, historically used for both milk and for meat.

Icelandic sheep are very hardy, resistant to parasites, and can go out on pasture on their own at a young age. Overall they are a very low maintenance breed.

Their beautiful wool is soft and reaches a suitable length for spinning when they’re young.

Icelandic sheep were traditionally raised in cold climates, where they were butchered when the summer grass was gone, typically at 6 months of age or even younger. I’ll talk more about the age for butchering in a minute.

 

Deworming Sheep

Like most animals, sheep can get worms. There are commercial dewormers available, but overworking can make the parasites resistant to dewormers, causing more problems in the long run. When it comes to raising sheep for meat, I definitely prefer using the natural dewormers to ensure there are no chemical residues in the meat.

An experienced sheep keeper can tell by looking closely at a sheep’s eyes whether they are anemic, a sign of parasite overload.

I dewormed with a syringe filled with homemade paste, the same stuff I give my horses. It consists of pumpkin seeds, molasses, raw garlic and cloves ground together in a blender. Add water if needed to achieve a paste consistency. I administer 2 T for a 75lb lamb. This home remedy is inexpensive and seems to be effective. You can find the recipe here.

 

Shearing

Although there is no need to shear when raising sheep for meat, our Icelandics had beautiful, soft wool in a beautiful combination of colors. As a spinner, I definitely did not want the wool to go to waste!

I paid a professional shearer $60 to shear my flock.

I washed and sold 3 of the fleeces for a total of $72, and was left with 3 for my own use.

 

Butchering Age for Lambs

We butchered our lambs when the pasture ran out. They were not quite 7 months old and around 80lbs live weight.

Butchering at a younger age gives you a delicious milder flavored meat. It is the difference between lamb and mutton. The oldest lamb we have ever butchered was 10 months old and was still good!

If you have access to pasture, you can certainly let your sheep get larger before slaughter. I’ve found that most animals taste better when they’ve been on pasture rather than hay, so prefer to slaughter before the green grass runs out.

When raising sheep for meat, it’s important to keep in mind that they have a very low yield compared to other animals. Sheep yield around 35% of their live weight in edible meat, so a 100lb lamb will give you about 35lbs of meat. After about 125lbs live weight, this ratio actually starts to go down. Most experienced sheep keepers try to butcher when the sheep is under 125lbs for the best yield and best tasting meat.

 

Slaughtering Sheep

This was the first year that we have slaughtered our own sheep. The rising costs of hiring a butcher made it not worth it, and since some of our local butchers have gone out of business, no one even had an opening for us.

In our area, the going rate to butcher a sheep is around $130. Our 80lb sheep yielded about 30lbs each, so the slaughtering cost alone would have been over $4/lb! 

We normally butcher our own chickens and turkeys, so do have some experience, just not with lambs! To learn the process, we watched YouTube videos (Bon Appetit has a great one!), and actually found one of my husband’s co-workers who had worked at a butcher shop and was willing to come over and walk us through cutting up the first sheep. 

Hard as it sounds, it really wasn’t bad. The slaughtering, gutting and skinning took us a few hours total for 5 sheep. We hung the sheep in a cool garage. The cutting and packaging process took a day and a half. 

 

The Finished Lamb Products

We ended up keeping the ewe (female sheep) we raised to breed to our friend’s ram. The 5 wethers (castrated males) weighed around 80lbs each and yielded 30lbs of meat on average, plus scraps for dog meat.

In total, we ended up with 150lbs of usable meat. When cutting your own meat, you can choose which cuts to make. We were using a hand saw, which was time-consuming, so chose to cut most of the meat into roasts. We did a few steaks and chops, some ribs and lamb racks, stew meat, about 3lbs of ground lamb per sheep, and some lamb bacon. Lamb has a high-fat content, making it a good pork substitute when it comes to bacon, ham, and sausage.

Overall we were really happy with the results and now raise sheep for meat every year!

 

Lamb Products

• 150lbs meat

• 20lbs dog meat

• 3 fleeces (wool)

• 5 sheep hides for tanning

 

Total Expenses: $510 – $72 from 3 fleeces sold = $438

 

$438 / 150lbs meat = $2.92/lb (compared to $9-$18 a pound in the store, depending on cut)

 

In the end, we grew 150lbs of meat for a total of $2.92 per pound, with the free bonuses of one sheep that we kept, 20lbs of dog meat, wool for spinning and 5 sheep hides to tan. 

 

If we had slaughtered all six sheep, we would have gotten around 180lbs of meat for the same expense, bringing the total cost to $2.43/lb.

 

Interested in raising sheep for meat? Storey’s Guide to Raising Sheep is a great reference book to have on hand!