Tour of the Museum

Sheep

Location:

Small Animal Barn, Canada Agriculture and Food Museum

About:

In Canada, sheep are raised primarily for their meat but also produce wool and milk. At the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum, you will meet many delightfully different breeds of sheep.

Commercial breeds at the Museum include:

The Museum also houses the following rare sheep breeds:

Note: Not all breeds are at the Museum at all times.

Breeding:

A ewe’s gestation period is 147 days, or about 5 months.

Care and Feeding:

Sheep are ruminants. Their compound stomachs enable them to digest fibre or forages. They have front teeth on the bottom jaw only. They have four compartments to their stomach and chew a cud.

In the summer, you can find many of the Museum’s sheep outdoors, grazing on grass.

Sheep in Canada:

There are approximately 1 million sheep in Canada on around 11,000 farms. Canadian sheep are raised mainly for their meat. The wool is merely a by-product. Some are also raised for their milk, which is often made into cheese.

Ontario and Alberta are the main sheep-producing areas in Canada. Canada produces about 40 percent of the lamb consumed by Canadians. The rest is imported from Australia and New Zealand. Most of the raw wool produced by Canadian sheep is exported, and processed wool is imported from Australia, New Zealand, the US, and the UK.

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