The Ahlhausen sheep
Power of sheep farming! In fact, the Ahlhausener Landschaf has a central position in the ecological agriculture of Gut Ahlhausen, because the shepherd was the first to be built after the reorganization of agriculture in the lands of Schloss Ahlhausen in 2015. After the rediscovered true-to-scale map of the extent of agriculture with all areas and uses, as the General Procurator Moritz Friedrich Bölling had mapped in 1812, showed the high proportion of pasture land more precisely, the spacious paddock pastures could be set up accordingly for the shepherds. Meadow orchards and grass clover fields to produce their own energy-rich winter fodder for the sheep have been added.
The essential character of the Gut Ahlhausen farm is characterized by the preservation and care of the landscape, which pays attention to the preservation of biodiversity in all areas and the open grazing of a pasture-grazing sheep breed is the tried and tested means. Only through our ecological form of sheep husbandry and breeding can this path be successfully followed in terms of sustainability. Even if this is the only way that our sheep in our sheep farm are "allowed" to grow old, in our opinion the targeted slaughter of individual animals remains ecologically and breeding essential. Of course, our sheep should not be transported to other slaughterhouses, so we started talking to the district veterinarians of the Ennepe-Ruhr district about creating our own land slaughterhouse using a mobile slaughterhouse.
At the beginning of sheep farming in 2015 at Schloss Ahlhausen, we were therefore faced with the choice of a suitable type of sheep with high health and robustness for year-round open grazing, with a grazing ability that could also manage the hilly country in the ups and downs of the long distances and with an excellent grazing ability Meat quality faced with the challenge of finding it. In order to be able to build up and control all of this in a sustainable way, we decided to breed the Ahlhausener Landschaf ourselves, which we have been trying to train out of the Bentheimer Landschaf mother line that we have developed in our shepherd ever since.
The Ahlhausener Landschaf is marked like the Bentheimer, has a stocky build and has a high grazing performance. Our breeding bucks are crosses outside of our breeding criteria that are all licensed Bentheimers that have been awarded as federal or state winners. We also pay attention to a high fur and wool quality, even if the possibilities of a more profitable wool utilization are shamefully small in our times - in view of the highly valued natural product wool. But here, too, we want to look for better solutions in the sheep farm at Schloss Ahlhausen in the future - the Ahlhausen landscape will also give us the basis for this.
