North Country Cheviot and Tunis Sheep Made with Xara Your Source for Quality North Country Cheviot and Rare-breed Tunis Sheep We have three distinct flocks of ewes in our breeding program: 8 purebred, registered North Country Cheviot ewes, 7 purebred, registered Tunis and so far 16 Tunis/Cheviot F1 commercial crosses.   Currently we are concentrating on building up our commercial crosses by breeding our Cheviot ewes to a purebred Tunis ram.  We really like the quality of the cross.  They are strong, hardy, fast growing and have adopted more of the Tunis temperament. We will be breeding these ewes to a NC Cheviot ram in the fall of 2012 for our F2 market lamb cross. The 2009 F1 cross rams gained at least half a pound a day, and some cases considerably more than that.  All were 110 lbs live weight in 6 months or less with the first of the rams being shipped at just over 4 months of age.  We expect our F2 cross to have better gain than the F1 and with the animals that we have selected to have better loin and leg development though the F1 loin and leg is pretty nice.  We will be breeding some of our NC Cheviot ewes to a North Country ram in 2011 and again in 2012 to add replacement ewes to our purebred flock. We purchased another purebred, registered Tunis ram from New York in the fall of 2010.  This young ram is a more contemporary style of ram with lovely stretch of loin and leg development.  What really attracted us to this ram was the breadth of his back and the quality of his bone and feet.  He has been DNA tested for scrapie resistance and is RR for Codon 171. We have DNA tested all of our purebred animals for Codon 171 for scrapie resistance . Both Tunis are RR as are the majority of our Tunis ewes.  No Tunis are worse than QR.  Our Cheviots are predominately QQ with one QR.   Any new purebred breeding stock will be DNA tested at Codon 171 and we will be selecting for QR or better animals. Any purebred ram purchased for producing breeding stock will need to be RR for Codon 171.  More information on selecting for scrapie resistance. In the summer of 2011 we will be buying a new North Country Ram from production tested stock that has been DNA tested for codon 171. While we are not yet on the GenOvis program, we started in 2009 to keep the following data on all our sheep: • breeding dates • lambing date •