Är merinokorsningar ett alternativi jämtländsk fårhållning?

Sammanfattning: Sheep breeding contributes not only with wool, hides, meat and milk but also with openlandscapes. The sheep’s wool is a good raw material thanks to a lot of different qualities as itis water rejecting and easy to form. The wool production today is concentrated to specificplaces in the world which leads to environmental problems and a distorted market. InJämtland, a province in Sweden, there is right now a staking going on for local production andrefining of wool in a project called Ullforum. In the precursor to the project merino rams wereimported and crossed with ewes of the Swedish sheep population ‘Svea’. The aim with thismaster thesis was to evaluate how the breeding have worked out considering the productionresult by analyzing information from the Swedish sheep recording scheme ‘Elitlamm’ and byinterviewing the sheep breeders that are concerned. To be able to answer the overall questionif merino crosses are an alternative in the sheep breeding in Jämtland there are some questionsthat the study have focused on. How big is the population today? How have the growth traits,the wool quality and the fertility been affected? Which are the possible problems? What dothe future possibilities look like? The import of merino to the sheep herds in Jämtland hasaffected the growth traits and the fertility negatively while the wool traits have beenimproved. There are many possibilities as well as problems connected to the project Ullforumand the production of fine fibre wool in Jämtland. Merino crosses seem to be an alternative inthe sheep breeding of Jämtland given that the population increases and that the selection forthe desirable traits continues.