Resources About Sheep Ecology in America Sheep are a natural, low-cost means of managing America's federal, state and private lands, even as they produce other resources, such as wool, meat and lanolin.
Proper grazing can benefit the environment, wildlife, the tax-paying public, and consumers.
Sheep grazing can be an effective biological control program to increase conifer growth. Furthermore, sheep are far less costly than chemicals or mechanical vegetation-control measures. In the United States and Canada, sheep grazing has helped regenerate ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, radiata pine, sugar pine, spruce and western hemlock forests. In California, Oregon and Washington, the U.S. Forest Service finds sheep an effective replacement for herbicides in the control of brush and weeds that would otherwise crowd out conifer seedlings. In California's Tahoe National Forest, about 1,000 sheep help promote tree growth in a forest area that burned in 1978.