Saltmarsh Ranch Soay Sheep

07/01/2025

Fellow Soay breeders and other small livestock folks: we are selling our farm and moving to town after a glorious 21-year run at raising small heritage livestock. The farm is all set up of course and ready to go-- turnkey. If you're interested in purchasing it, here's a link with description and a contact for the realtor:

Our two-decade adventure raising heritage Soay sheep has come to an end. We are selling our farm and moving to town. We would love to find a buyer who already has a small farm looking to expand — or a new breeder — who would like to jump-start their livestock program with a farm in place to hand...

01/31/2022

Spring is around the corner and ordinarily we would be posting about upcoming lambing, but not this year. Check out the update on our farm website: www.saltmarshranch.com. Happy lambing to all the active Soay breeders!

Soay are the ideal small sheep for small acreage. We are located in southern Oregon

04/21/2021

Wondering what percentage of your Soay lambs will be twins? Or whether a ewe who twins once will twin again? If you breed your ewe lambs, will they twin just as much as ewes you allow to mature before you breed them? For answers, go to my new blog post at The Soay Sheep Chronicles:

We do not have any way to analyze the effect of nutrition on whether a ewe has twins. The commercial breeders use a system called “flushing” to get their ewes to twin. It involves ramping up the ewes’ nutrition (better quality hay, feed supplement, beet pulp) for the 30 days or so prior to the...

04/14/2021

Happy adult rams and happy yearling rams on grass for the first time since last October. No more lugging around hay flakes -- hooray!

And note the big guy over on the left by the fence. He, like most of our sheep, prefers the blackberry leaves fouling the fence to the grass under his feet. For more on this endearing trait of Soay sheep, go to: http://priscilla.saltmarshranch.com/2019/07/04/update-on-pasture-food-preferences-of-soay-sheep/

12/05/2020

Are you waiting out breeding season and looking for something fun to do while you wait for lambing next spring? Do you know the lovely, haunting music on the CD "The Lost Songs of St. Kilda?" Would you like to learn the piano pieces yourself? If so, you are in luck. I have transcribed all of them and have added a ninth song I discovered quite by accident a month ago.

To hear the music, order the CD or get it on iTunes or other streaming service.

To order the sheet music, go to my blog, the Soay Sheep Chronicles (priscilla dot saltmarshranch dot com).

To read the endearing if improbable story of how the songs were "found" in a Scottish old people's home and the even more serendipitous story of how I came to transcribe the music, go to a wonderful new website just created by my friend Stuart MacKenzie. Enjoy!

This is the story of how Trevor Morrison, in an Edinburgh Care Home, recorded melodies remembered since his childhood which became a best selling album 'The Lost Songs of St Kilda'.​ Then...

06/27/2020

For those of you struggling with how to get your self-shedding Soay's fleece gathered up for spinning and knitting, here's a brief video showing Steve in the final stages of rooing a beautiful dark brown ewe. As you can see, he methodically and gently pulls the fleece down and then off, starting at the ewe's neck and working his way back.

04/17/2020

If you are wondering how the gender lottery turns out in a large sample of purebred Soay lambs, check out the new graph of over 500 lambs and their genders on my blog, The Soay Sheep Chronicles (http://priscilla.Saltmarshranch.com). It probably won’t make you feel better if you are getting a bad ram/ewe split this year, but at least you’ll see that you are not alone. So far here? Five rams and no ewes. Sigh.

It’s been five years since I agonized over, and then wrote about, the nail-biting wait each spring to see whether our pregnant ewes offer up an acceptable percentage of ewe lambs. By now even the charts in the old post are unreadable, for which I apologize. Rather than trying to figure out how the...

07/04/2019

Every few years one of our sheep presents me with more evidence of our flock's preference for really icky weeds -- poison oak, baby star thistle, or noxious blackberry vines -- over perfectly good grass. Our Shakespearan ram Burbage just did it again. Enjoy this brief update on the subject at The Soay Sheep Chronicles: http://priscilla.saltmarshranch.com/2019/07/04/update-on-pasture-food-preferences-of-soay-sheep/

06/03/2019

Back in January I put up a new post on my blog, The Soay Sheep Chronicles, about the benefits of starting your flock of heritage sheep with a trio of wethers. The three handsome castrated rams featured in that post went to their new home over the weekend, and they are even more handsome than they were in January, with one sleek from shedding his coat, and the other two in progress. We submit that with their symmetrical horns and beautiful tan, brown and black fleece, these three fellows make pretty good pasture art!

01/25/2019

Curious about the pros and cons of starting your heritage sheep adventure with an all-wether flock? Check out the new post on my blog, The Soay Sheep Chronicles.

01/22/2019

If you like the new cover photo on this page, thank fellow Soay breeder Sally Gallagher. She and Ed gave this fabulous sign to us several years ago. We even know who the model is:Hesket, one of our all-time favorite rams.