Breeding Practices  (Please scroll down)

Remember the "horse of a different color" in the movie Wizard of Oz?  If we want to consistently breed good quality purple horses, we cannot do it by breeding a poor quality green horse to a mediocre yellow one.  Rather, we continue to linebreed our good quality purple horses  together until we have consistently set their traits without losing anything else in the process.

When, and if, we are ready to focus on
introducing a trait that we do not have in our breeding stock, or that needs to be
strengthened in our stock, it is at that point that we outcross to another line within the Barbados Blackbelly breed, which preserves the integrity of our pedigrees and safeguards the genetics of the breed itself.  It is difficult  to set a  specific inherited trait,  while maintaining other breed characteristics and superior quality.  We know this, therefore we are extremely selective in our criteria for breeding.  Our goal is to try to set those specific traits, one at a time, and yet keep the other qualities balanced, before moving on to the next one.  

Mike has traveled far and wide acquiring the stock that we are breeding today.  It has not been an easy road, and we are not naive enough to think that we have the only game in town when it comes to breeding Barbados Blackbellies.  We do, however, know what we have in the way of quality in our sheep, and breed characteristics in our animals that we cultivate and guard when we pick  mates for them.  We are also careful not to double up on flaws when breeding, and we definitely don't stick our heads in the sand and pretend that their flaws don't exist.  In other words, we know what our  sheep  are made of and we breed accordingly. 

Once we begin to see the desired results of what we are breeding for, we are firm
believers in linebreeding at that point. If we don't linebreed then, we will never produce the consistency in quality that we want.  In simpler terms, we could get a sheep of  a different color each time we outcross.   Don't get me wrong, there is a time and place for linebreeding and outcrossing within the breed in a breeding program.