"Natural color, naturally raised, naturally good sheep."
About Hickory Hill Farm
Our farm has been in the family since 1950 when my grandmother bought it for a home and a working farm. Our focus has been on raising sheep, ensuring their health and well being with organic principles as much as we can, and always with humane treatment.
Organic Principles
Our sheep thrive on pasture, supplemented with hay and grain as needed. We do not incorporate any antibiotics, hormones or animal byproducts in their feed. Antibiotics are only used to treat when necessary. Diatomaceous earth mixed with the grain and mineral mix helps to promote a natural way of controlling insect pest problems. We provide a loose mineral mix specially formulated for sheep. We feed hay from our farm fields. We keep them supplied with clean well water year round, pumped from the same well which serves our home. We no longer sell individual lambs to customers for meat or bottle lambs. We do sell breeding stock.
The flock started out with 17 ewes from a mixed breed group of lambs in 1997 purchased from Caroline and Slim Stalnaker of Strasburg, Virginia and a purebred natural colored Romney ram purchsed in 1998 from Marlene Halstead, Rocky Top Farm, Ottsville, Pennsylvania. We have kept some ewe lambs to increase the flock size and purchased a purebred Tunis ram lamb, Champion, in Spring of 2000. Our original Romney ram was sold in Fall of 2000 as a breeding ram. Since then we used Drew a half Romney ram and in 2004 we acquired Gallant, a purebred Tunis ram lamb and three new adult ewes of purebred Romney stock. Our current breeding rams are Von Byron and Viceroy. Von Byron is a cross of mostly Romney and Corriedale. Viceroy is a CVM/Romeldale/Romney cross. Our breeding program yields lambs of different colors and body types.
Humane treatment
We enjoy our sheep and make sure they are protected from harm. They all have names and are "friendly". Our original group all had A-names such as Annabelle, Alice, and Audrey. Their lambs from the first season of births had B-names such as Beauty, Belle, and Betty. The next season of births include lambs from the A-girls and the B-girls and have names like Colleen, Cloud, and Charisma. In Spring 2001, we had all D-names like Delight, Denise, and Devine. In each group of new lambs, we spend time getting to know them and making sure that they are cared for in the best manner to ensure they are healthy and happy.
News of 2022
This spring our ewes gave us five sets of triplets, twelve sets of twins, and seven singles. We had five bottle-supplemented lambs who were not getting quite enough milk from their mamas, but none were full-time bottle babies.
The lambs are all named with Y-names this year. On particularly friendly set of twins, one solid black and the other solid white, are named Yin and Yang.
(Click on the photo to see a larger version.)
(Click on the photo to see a larger version.)