Hello, my name is  Lone Star Annie.  I am a Barbados Blackbelly sheep that  was born at Lone Star Farm.  Now I live in Minnesota on Nate Teig's farm.  My sister Lone Star Agnes moved to Wisconsin to live with June Wilharm and her family.  We are hair sheep, not wool sheep, but we adjust to all kinds of climates.

Let Us Tell You Something About Us

My husband, Mike, and I moved to the country and started living the good life in 1996.  It  didn't take but a few months for my love of mowing to turn into quite a chore after caring for our whole five acre mini-farm through a Texas summer.  Yaupon was my biggest bane.  It is a noxious shrub that if left to what nature intended can barely be uprooted short of using a bulldozer, preferably one that throws fire.  We started looking for some livestock to raise that would help keep the mowing to a minimum, and please Lord, let them eat yaupon.  We found ourselves at a gentleman's farm in Grimes County, buying what are now known as American Blackbelly Sheep.  Back then, the horned and hornless were not separated by the Barbados Blackbelly Sheep Association International, the registry for both breeds of sheep.  We raised American Blackbelly Sheep from 1996 until 2002 when we learned that the polled (hornless) Barbados Blackbelly was endangered and the registry needed people to take some of these sheep to raise before they were lost to extinction.  We have been helping to preserve the breed ever since.

We had our ups and downs trying to locate good breeding stock that was truly polled because there had been so much cross-breeding between the American and Barbados breeds.  We finally purchased some stock and began doing our best to raise the polled breed.  To our dismay, the purest ones we could buy were still producing scurs, some more like horn buds.  It took a lot of selective breeding and culling to finally be able to produce rams that didn't have horn buds or scurs.  We were told it couldn't be done (breeding polled aniimals from horned stock) but we eventually did it in the phenotype.  However, we did not have it in the genotype, meaning the genetics were not pure for hornless.  We sold what we had and purchased more polled breeding stock, only to find that they also produced horn buds.  We have since learned that the horn buds are an acceptable practice that some breeders call scurs.  There seems to be some confusion among breeders these days between the two.  Horn buds are knobs firmly attached to the head where a horn would normally grow on a horned variety of sheep.  They may get knocked off the head during fighting among rams, but they are not scurs.   As the BBSAI Breed Standard states, "the rams are polled or may have small loose scurs".  We at Lone Star Farm are doing all we can to eradicate scurs.  If a ram has a clean head, meaning he is smooth-headed, there is no doubt about his polledness.  Lately, I have seen a trend that assures me there are other breeders out there who do care about the pollednes of this wonderful breed. 

Something we have enjoyed since we have been raising sheep is  watching sheep behavior.  Jesus often refers to us as sheep in the Bible.  We wanted to find out firsthand why He does that.  We not only found out why, we found out that He truly loves His sheep and is a very caring shepherd.  We've grown in our own relationships with Christ through learning to care for our sheep.  It has given us many rewards.  So our sheep started out as a hobby that we hoped might grow into a business, but instead grew into a passion.  I hope you can find as much enjoyment in your life as we have with our sheep.   


Lone Star Farm | Barbados Blackbelly Sheep