| About Us |
| Maine..."Vacationland"-the land of L.L.Bean & lobster dinner. "The Way Life is Supposed to Be" according to the State's promotional slogan. Moose and bear abound in this highly agriculturalized part of the state. Farm tractors and giant harvesters rumble down the main street through the center of town on their way to lush growing potato, oat and wheat fields. On the side of the road, right in the center of a town of 470 people is a quiet and fertile spot, never touched by chemical fertilizers- NORTHERN MAINE ICELANDICS. For decades a horse farm, the soil has never been robbed of it's natural goodness. Icelandic sheep flourish in this setting, and yet are not in danger of losing their natural hardiness, for conditions in northern Maine are if anything, more rigorous than in Iceland!. Constant winds, frequent rain and mist, and winters lasting nearly 7 months that may see temperatures drop to -54 degrees F test the endurance of all creatures...man or beast. |
| It is in this setting that NORTHERN MAINE ICELANDICS maintains a small, high quality flock of the most versatile sheep in the world, the Icelandic. Our breeding stock is very carefully selected. Constant improvement of the flock through severe culling, combined with the continuous introduction of new genetics into the herd with semen from the finest rams in Iceland enables us to offer breeding stock that is among the best in North America. We breed for a low, stocky, and long body conformation, with thick, heavy muscling, and the densest & finest wool possible with this breed. In Iceland, the white sheep are preferred, and most efforts to improve the breed have gone into them, while the colored lines receive less attention. Here at Northern Maine Icelandics, we convert the finest of the white lines to colored, achieving the most rapid improvements possible. Our Federal scrapie vet calls our herd "the most consistent and finest quality herd I've seen, better than all the other flocks put together." Additionally, in November of 2003, a rare opportunity was afforded Northern Maine Icelandics and eight other farms in North America, through an invitation from the Agricultural Advisor of the Southram semen collection facility, to travel to Iceland, to study a new state-of-the-art method of artificial insemination under it's developer, research scientist and veterinarian Thorstein Olafsson, PHD. We, (Northern Maine Icelandics and three |
| other farms in 2003) are now in the process of field testing this new procedure, which in the preliminary laboratory testing has proven highly successful. (See "Vaginal AI Trip") We at NMI will continue in our quest to promote this breed, while striving to develop and offer animals approaching the quality found in Iceland's finest flocks. We are enrolled in the USDA Voluntary Scrapie Flock Certification Program, and have just passed our 5th. annual inspection, so in December of this year we will be CERTIFIED scrapie free! We are now trained and certified in the new FAMACHA method of controlling sheep internal parasites, a program new to North America which was developed in South Africa to slow the progression of resistance to wormers. We also have always been footrot and OPP free, and are active members of ISBONA. |
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