It's not that great, or at least, people don't seem to think it is. Perhaps "heavy unsaleable wool" is closer to the mark. Sheep farmers have been complaining for years now that the price of wool is considerably less than the price of paying someone to shear it off. Shearing of sheep these days happens for animal welfare reasons.
And while some sheep graze on land that is otherwise non-productive, an plenty of them don't (e.g. almost all lowland breeds).
I suspect that keeping chickens as you suggest is sensible too, but (in)famously there are zoonotic risks to large scale domestic poultry farming, and I have never seen a comparison of the numbers over incineration, anaerobic digestion and/or composting. (I expect they work out better but I haven't seen them.)
That's the wool on sheep grown for their meat though (or rather for the meat of their lambs). If you are considering a future where we eat much less meat, it's not inconceivable that we would be either raising wool breeds but eating them anyway, or raising old-fashioned breeds that do both. I am not an expert in sheep husbandry though; I've got to the end of my thinking on this. So I could just be wrong.
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It's not that great, or at least, people don't seem to think it is. Perhaps "heavy unsaleable wool" is closer to the mark. Sheep farmers have been complaining for years now that the price of wool is considerably less than the price of paying someone to shear it off. Shearing of sheep these days happens for animal welfare reasons.
And while some sheep graze on land that is otherwise non-productive, an plenty of them don't (e.g. almost all lowland breeds).
I suspect that keeping chickens as you suggest is sensible too, but (in)famously there are zoonotic risks to large scale domestic poultry farming, and I have never seen a comparison of the numbers over incineration, anaerobic digestion and/or composting. (I expect they work out better but I haven't seen them.)
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