Montadale

Mattingly's first crosses were followed by nine years of selection and line-breeding before the type settled.

The breed stayed largely American; the first export went to Canada in 1960.

Rams weigh 200 to 275 pounds and ewes 160 to 180.

The wool is very white with little lanolin, so less of each fleece washes away as grease and the clip yields high.

The founding standard of excellence for the breed asked for good mothers, sheep that would claim their young, and for a strong, healthy, vigorous animal with style and alertness. The Montadale Sheep Breeders Association's standards page puts it as hardiness and maternal instinct, the qualities the founding breeders insisted on.

Lambing was designed in. The same founding standard called for a small head, to reduce or eliminate lambing trouble.

They are dual purpose in the real sense: the ewes raise good lambs and the wool sells, which suits a producer selling into both markets rather than optimising for one.

The Cheviot half shows in the bare face and the easy lambing; the Columbia half shows in the frame and the fleece.

A range of climates. Oklahoma State University's breed profile records Montadales proven in the cold of upper New England, the heat of the South, on Midwestern farms, on the ranges of the Great Plains and in the rain of the Far West.

They are a wool breed and need shearing: ewe fleeces typically weigh 8 to 12 lb with a staple of 3.25 to 4.5 inches. The founding standard's open face and clean legs were chosen to prevent wool blindness and to keep foreign matter from damaging the fleece and carcass.

The trade is that being between two things means leading in neither. They grow more slowly than a terminal sire cross and their wool does not fetch what a fine-wool breed's does, so the argument for them is the combination.

The Montadale Breeders Association registers the breed. Ask for both numbers when you buy, lamb growth and fleece weight, because a Montadale that leads in one and trails badly in the other is missing its own point.

Recent sale prices on HoofnHorn, where there are any, are further down this page.