Apple Rose Farm
A Breed on the Brink

Following a 38-year successful career in education, Elizabeth J. Ferraro turned her focus to researching and studying high-quality fleece production. In pursuing this objective, she chose between alpaca and sheep farming, ultimately selecting Cormo Sheep for their excellent white fleece characteristics and California Red Sheep for their distinctive rose-toned fleece with soft raspberry-colored fibers.

Over the past 24 years, she has carefully developed these two fleece lines, marketing them to hand spinners and fiber artists. In addition, she has provided high-quality breeding stock that adheres to the established standards for each breed. Her work has been driven by a clear objective: the conservation of these two minor breeds in the United States.

I have been breeding Cormo Sheep for the past 24 years using the official breed standard established by the Downie Family in Tasmania. During this time, a number of things have taken place in the United States that greatly threaten the breed's existence here. It is very difficult today to find pure Cormo Sheep that are not either inbred or crossed with some other breed.

The breed standard calls for white sheep that do not have horns. The American Cormo Sheep Association, for a number of years, did not follow the breed standard and registered sheep with horns and usually any lambs that had parents already registered. This practice had a strong effect on the remaining Cormo Sheep. They have since applied the breed standard.

A second problem was with the importation of semen from just two rams that were obtained from the Downie Family. The semen was good, but was overused. It appears in too many bloodlines, thus the inbreeding was magnified.

The third problem was the fact that most of the flocks of Cormo Sheep were owned by people who just wanted a few sheep for fleece that they could hand spin. They also wanted to get colored Cormo fleece. That means one has to crossbreed with another breed that is brown or black to get the color. Bear in mind that these people were not skilled in genetics. Sometimes the first cross-breeding did result in a lovely fine micron fleece with Cormo characteristics. The breeding back to the resulting lambs does not work to produce a pure Cormo Colored Sheep. Many fine pure Cormo Sheep were lost to the breed standard this way.

I established The Cormo Sheep Conservation Registry to try to protect the breed standard in the United States. This effort worked in a small way to maintain a couple of hundred pure Cormo Sheep that we sold to small breeders. However, I have started to downsize my flock and plan to retire quite soon. Where the breed goes from here is unknown.