sheep farming

[prince]

The more I learn,the more I lose hope of making any money sheep/goat farming, or farming anything for that matter. How do farmers in the US do it?
Stores sell meat,produce, etc..... somebody is producing these things, I am not convinced yet that farmers who provide the consumer with all that are loosing money consistently.

[TexasBlaze]

Farmers that do those types of farming are in large scale industrial types of situations. My family owns two chicken farms that are definitally industrial. Each house (3 in one farm, 6 in the other) gets 60,000 chickens that we raise for six weeks before they go to processing. There is no way someone who didnt have an industrial setting could make a living with chickens. Same way with lambs. Or horses. Or cows ect. Livestock is very industrial nowadays and unless your willing to dish out the cash to start up, (we took out a million dollar loan to buy our second farm) then don't plan on making any money with animals.

[Celeste]

I used to raise cattle. I kept about 25 cows and a bull. In dry years I did well to do a little better than breaking even. When we got good rains, we did make a small profit. We decided to sell the cows because the money that we made was not enough to merit the work that went into the project. I can make a much higher wage for my time with other work. It is not that there is no money in it. There is just not enough money for the investment of time and effort.

There is also the risk that you will lose large amounts of money. My father-in-law once lost 13 cows and his very expensive bull to one bolt of lightening. This was half of his cow herd. He not only lost the animals; he also had to pay a man with a backhoe to come in and bury them.