Stabilised for profit.
Nine years of disciplined breeding turned a cross into a stabilised breed. Twenty years on, we are still the leading producer of it. Here's why that matters to your bottom line.
You want to know what's coming.
When you put a Hillcroft ram over your ewes, you want to know what's coming. You want lambs that perform consistently on your farm, at the processing works, and on the plate.
That kind of predictability doesn't come from chance. It comes from stabilisation - the long, careful work of breeding for type and trait until the genetics reliably reproduce themselves. We started in 2005. We had a stabilised type in nine years. The breed name was registered in 2014. We have been the leading producer of it ever since.
The UltraWhite began at Hillcroft Farms in 2005. Stud principal Dawson Bradford needed to reduce the labour load in the sheep enterprise, looked for an existing breed that would meet the full criteria, and found none.
So he set out to build one.
The Poll Dorset already carried most of the traits Dawson wanted - growth, muscle, fertility, mothering - but it grew wool. The trial of crossing Poll Dorset with various shedding breeds eventually settled on a blend with the White Dorper. The Dorper side brought hardiness, do-ability, and the shedding trait itself.
It took nine years to stabilise a type. The breed name was registered in 2014. The UltraWhite is no longer a composite. It is its own breed - and Hillcroft remains its leading producer.
The White Dorper side of the foundation gave us something we didn't want to lose: ewe robustness. UltraWhite ewes can, as the saying goes, run off the smell of an oily rag.
That robustness is what lets the breed integrate cleanly into mixed farming systems. Our own UltraWhite ewes graze stubbles between crops and hold in containment on low-quality feeds without performance loss.
A stabilised UltraWhite type
“Breeding great sheep is a careful balance of data and type.”
We love our numbers. We are also sticklers for type. We have been deliberate, year on year, about stamping a consistent UltraWhite type into the breed so that what you buy will breed true when you get them home.
The numbers don't lie.
Twenty years of LambPlan data. Six generations of pedigree on every registered sheep. Genomic testing across the flock. The charts below are the proof.
Genetic trend by trait, 2021 to 2025. From the 2026 Hillcroft Farms brochure.