A Comparison of Five Methods of Estimating Clean Fleece Weight

Sidwell, George M.; Neale, P. E.; Jessup, Gordon L.

doi:10.2527/jas1958.173593x

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Much of the early animal science research with wool was concerned with establishing procedures for estimating clean wool production of a flock (e.g., Jones and Lush, 1927) or of individual sheep (e.g., Hardy, 1933;Sidwell et al, 1958) without shearing and washing the whole fleece. This eventually led to the procedure used today (Johnson and Larsen, 1978), in which the whole fleece is shorn and then subsampled with the aid of a coring machine.…”

Section: Wool Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

ASAS CENTENNIAL PAPER: Impacts of animal science research on United States sheep production and predictions for the future1

Lupton

2008

Journal of Animal Science

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One hundred years ago, there were more than 48 million sheep in the United States. In 1910, they were valued at $4/head, with 43% of income coming from the sale of sheep, lambs, and meat and 57% coming from wool. Over the years, fluctuations in this ratio have challenged the breeder and researcher alike. By 2007, sheep numbers had declined to 6.2 million, with the average sheep shearing 3.4 kg of wool (representing <10% of income), 0.2 kg more than in 1909 but 0.5 kg less than fleeces in 1955. Sheep operations have declined by more than 170,000 in the past 40 yr. A cursory examination of this information might lead one to conclude that animal science research has made little impact on sheep production in the United States. On the contrary, lamb crops in the new millennium (range = 109 to 115%) are greater than those recorded in the 1920s (85 to 89%) and dressed lamb weights increased from 18 to 32 kg from 1940 to the present. In the past century, researchers conducted thousands of investigations, with progress reported in new, existing, and crossbreed evaluations, quantitative and molecular genetics, selection, nutrition, fiber, meat, hides, milk, growth, physiology, reproduction, endocrinology, management, behavior, the environment, disease, pharmacology, toxicology, and range, pasture, and forage utilization such that a vast amount of new information was accrued. Our understanding of sheep has benefited also from research conducted on other species, and vice versa. Many factors that have contributed to the decline in the sheep industry are not influenced easily by academic research (e.g., low per capita consumption of lamb meat, predation, reluctance to adopt new technologies, cost and availability of laborers with sheep-related skills, and fewer young people pursuing careers in agriculture). The size of the US sheep industry is expected to remain stable, with possible slow growth in the foreseeable future. To remain profitable, producers will take advantage of new (or previously unused) technologies, the desire of the public for things natural, domestic niche and international fiber markets, and the ability of the sheep to control noxious weeds and thrive in suboptimal ecosystems.

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Section: Wool Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%