Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Sheep breeding contributes not only with wool, hides, meat and milk but also with open
landscapes. The sheep’s wool is a good raw material thanks to a lot of different qualities as it
is water rejecting and easy to form. The wool production today is concentrated to specific
places in the world which leads to environmental problems and a distorted market. In
Jämtland, a province in Sweden, there is right now a staking going on for local production and
refining of wool in a project called Ullforum. In the precursor to the project merino rams were
imported and crossed with ewes of the Swedish sheep population ‘Svea’. The aim with this
master thesis was to evaluate how the breeding have worked out considering the production
result by analyzing information from the Swedish sheep recording scheme ‘Elitlamm’ and by
interviewing the sheep breeders that are concerned. To be able to answer the overall question
if merino crosses are an alternative in the sheep breeding in Jämtland there are some questions
that the study have focused on. How big is the population today? How have the growth traits,
the wool quality and the fertility been affected? Which are the possible problems? What do
the future possibilities look like? The import of merino to the sheep herds in Jämtland has
affected the growth traits and the fertility negatively while the wool traits have been
improved. There are many possibilities as well as problems connected to the project Ullforum
and the production of fine fibre wool in Jämtland. Merino crosses seem to be an alternative in
the sheep breeding of Jämtland given that the population increases and that the selection for
the desirable traits continues.