Hill Shepherd Farm specializes in breeding quality, well-built white and colored Angora Goats with exceptional fleece character, coverage and staple length. Animals and handspinning fleeces available at all times. Our herd is always open for your inspection or friendly visit.
 Our Angora Goat flock currently numbers around 50 adult breeding does and 20 replacement doe kids from our spring drop. We currently have five adult herdsires (two black, one brown and two registered white) and three buck kids being kept to yearling status for evaluation as potential herdsires.
Around 50% of our Angora Goat flock is colored or color-carrying stock, many of our Angora Goats carry both black and brown genetics, so it is common for a black doe to have brown kids or vice versa. The remaining 50% of our Angora Goat flock is high-quality white registered stock selected for fine, uniform hair from the best bloodlines available.
We strive to breed stylish, well-covered, squarely built goats with long stapled, uniform, character filled fleece5on, to insure we select animals with both the soft rolling skin conformation and body frame size that ensures yields of higher fleece weights and density. Colored angora goats who have a high percentage of registered white animals in their background are utilized to decrease kemp and increase mohair fleece yields.
Our fine haired white registered goats are being used to infuse additional mohair fineness and uniformity in our colored breeding program, in addition to producing a registered white show string. The registered white buck that we are using has exceptionally fine hair, microning at 24.5 mircrons at his 3rd mohair clip! We have been very lucky using these white goats in our colored program, we had two black kids and two blue kids in 2003 from registered white x colored combinations and in 2004 each registered white nanny we bred to color had a kid that showed some degree of color, ranging from faded red with black spots to solid black. This is highly unusual, as generally, you only get white when you breed white to colored animals.
We are members of the Colored Angora Goat Record and Registry and AAGBA and every effort is made to either record or register each breeding animal as appropriate to their quality and type.
 As former U.S. Editor for a New Zealand goat magazine, Sara had the opportunity to connect with many breeders across the country, when gathering both information and the foundation animals for our current breeding program. In 1997, we imported the first colored angora goat semen to the United States from Australia. We used this semen in the fall of 1999 on a select group of does and currently have several Australian progeny in the black portion of our herd. In 1998, Sara was asked to judge the colored angora goat class at the Estes Park Sheep and Wool Festival in Estes Park, Colorado. She is a Colored Angora Goat Breeders Association certified inspector and class instructor. From 1999 to 2001, Sara served as president for the Colored Angora Goat Breeders Association, the national association and registry of colored angora goats. In 2001, she had the honor of judging the Michigan Fiber Fest colored angora goat classes. In 2002, she judged white and colored goats at Michigan Fiber Fest, New Jersey's Fall Shepherd's Sheep & Wool Festival and at the Hartford County Fair. In 2003 she traveled along with Vernon to Oregon where she judged Black Sheep Gathering and met with other Colored Angora Goat judges to develop the CAGBA Judge's Program which is in continuing development. In 2004, Sara again judged at the Estes Park Wool Market show in Colorado. In January 2005, Vernon and Sara traveled to New Zealand where Sara judged the A&P Show at Rotorua and judged Estes Park Wool Market's Angora Goat show again in June of 2005. In 2008, she judged the Great Lakes Angora Goat Show in Wooster, Ohio. Vernon is a ruminant nutritionist and longtime livestock producer and oversees our flock health and nutrition program. He is regularly asked to speak on nutrition related topics at various shows and field days.
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Fun Features . . .
• View more of our goats in the photo album
• Download the Hill Shepherd Screensaver
Herd Health . . .
Herd health is very important to us. Any animals sent to shows or new herd additions are quarantined for at least 30 days apart from the rest of our flock to minimize the introduction of outside contagions. We are footrot free.
Our Breeding Focus . . .
Our selection focus, regardless of color is based on fleece fineness, fiber uniformity, vigor and body conformation.
Replacements . . .
Replacement herd sires are selected from within our herd for our colored breeding program. Because we are consistently adding registered white genetics into our colored goats we are able to maintain sufficient genetic diversity to ensure hybrid vigor. This approach, combined with selective linebreeding has helped us achieve colored angoras that are as fine haired as any white goat and sport mohair tails.
Read Sara's article on Angora Goats
first published in the
August/September '03 issue of
Hobby Farms Magazine
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