Idaho Sheep and Wool: The Industry, Its Economics, Predation, Grazing, and Idaho Law

Where the Idaho sheep industry stands

Idaho held 220,000 sheep and lambs on 1 January 2026. That total has been close to flat for eight years. The composition underneath it has not.

Idaho is carrying 30,000 fewer breeding animals than in 2018 and 15,000 more market animals. Replacement lambs, which set the flock's capacity two years out, are down 23.1 percent. Against the nation the gap is wide: United States breeding inventory fell 6.6 percent over the same period and ewes one year and older fell 6.0 percent, so Idaho's breeding decline has run about two and a half times the national rate and its share of the national breeding flock slipped from 4.79 percent to 4.29 percent.

One caution on that comparison, because it is endpoint-driven. Idaho's breeding inventory bottomed at 148,000 in 2022 and has been broadly flat since, at 160,000 for 2023 through 2025 and 155,000 in 2026. The 2.5x figure describes the distance between 2018 and 2026, not an ongoing rate.

Productivity moved too. The lamb crop fell from 158,000 head in 2018 to 138,000 in 2025, and the lambing rate fell from 122 lambs per 100 ewes in 2019 to 110 in 2023, where it has held for three years. The 122 is the peak within this eight-year window, not in the series: Idaho's lambing rate ran as high as 141 in 1994.

The hundred-year frame, briefly

Idaho ran 2,470,000 sheep and lambs on 1 January 1920, so the modern flock is 91.1 percent below the highest year on record, and wool production is 93.2 percent below its 1919 peak. Idaho ranked ninth of 48 states in 1930 and today ranks sixth among the 32 states NASS reports individually, holding 4.4 percent of the national flock, and tied for fifth in wool production in 2025. It rose in rank across a century in which it lost nine sheep in ten, because the states above it fell further.

The economics of a head of Idaho sheep

Everything above is a state total. This section is per head.

Wool and lamb are treated separately below and they are not documented equally. Wool can be stated precisely, because USDA NASS publishes Idaho production, price, value, and yield per head every year. Lamb cannot: NASS discontinued the Idaho lamb price series after 2007 and the national annual series after 2011, so there is no verified current lamb price on this page. NASS values a head of Idaho sheep at $235 on 1 January 2026 and its annual clip at $11.77, so wool is 5.0 percent of what the animal is worth and takes most of the space below. That is a gap in the public record rather than a measure of which half is larger.

Wool, which is the well-documented half

Idaho's 2025 clip was worth $2,001,000 across 170,000 head shorn. That is $11.77 of gross wool revenue per head.

Set that against labour. One H-2A range herder costs $25,588.92 a year at the 2026 adverse effect wage rate. It takes the wool off roughly 2,175 head to fund one herder for one year, and Idaho's entire 2025 clip would fund 78.

Value of production is down 34.3 percent in five years, on a 31.0 percent price decline and a 13.7 percent production decline from the 2022 peak. Wool per head is 8.1 pounds, down from 8.8 in 2018 and 2019, having moved between 8.1 and 8.4 since. The 2025 clip is the smallest in the 117-year published series.

Lamb, which is the thinner record

Idaho produced a lamb crop of 138,000 head in 2025 from roughly 125,000 breeding ewes on hand that January. NASS discontinued the price series that would say what those lambs sold for. The $235 per head it publishes is a valuation of the animal on hand, not a sale price. Current lamb price now lives only in USDA Agricultural Marketing Service market news, on a separate system and release schedule.

What can be documented is the market those lambs enter.

The global market both products sit inside

The wool price is set in a world market in which the entire American clip is a rounding error. The lamb price is set in a thin domestic market that competes for shelf space against imports now running about three-quarters of consumption. They are different mechanisms.

The Australian figures below are from a USDA Foreign Agricultural Service report dated 6 December 2023 with FAO shares for 2021, so they are several years older than the Idaho figures above. They are that report's numbers, not this page's analysis.

Wool: one dominant exporter, one dominant buyer

Those share calculations are order-of-magnitude rather than precise: NASS reports Idaho wool on a greasy basis and the Australian export figure mixes greasy, scoured and semi-processed wool, which do not convert one for one. The direction survives the difference. An Idaho grower is a price taker in a market where one exporting country and one buying country account for most of the volume, and where United States supply is far too small to move the number either way.

Sheep meat: China produces, Australia exports

World sheep meat production is almost 10 million MT carcass weight. China is the largest producer at about 2.62 million MT, 26 percent, and consumes most of what it produces. Australia is the largest exporter at 730,000 MT and about US$3.2 billion. New Zealand's production has fallen about 14 percent in three decades to roughly 450,000 MT. United States lamb and mutton imports in 2025, 371.5 million pounds or about 168,500 MT, are equivalent to roughly 23 percent of Australian sheep meat exports.

What that means for the U.S. market

United States lamb and mutton production has fallen from 551 million pounds in 1970 to 139.1 million in 2025, a 74.8 percent decline, while imports rose from 122 million pounds to 371.5 million, up 204 percent. Imports first exceeded domestic production in 2006, traded places with it through 2012, and have exceeded it in every year since 2013. In 2025 imports were 73.4 percent of total United States disappearance.

Import share rose for two reasons that are often run together: imports more than tripled while domestic production fell by three-quarters. Per capita disappearance fell from 2.90 pounds retail weight in 1970 to 1.32 in 2025, so this is a smaller market as well as a more imported one. None of it is reachable by Idaho statute. These are national figures from USDA's Economic Research Service, which maintains the series and updates it monthly; the supply and disappearance tables carry the current numbers.

How concentrated Idaho sheep ranching is

The 2022 Census of Agriculture counted 1,208 Idaho operations holding sheep. They are not similar businesses. The bands sum exactly to the census total of 230,681 head.

Within that last band, 12 operations of 5,000 head or more hold 134,120 sheep, 58.1 percent of every sheep in Idaho. Seventy-one and a half percent of the operations hold 3.5 percent of the animals.

Operations at that scale are the ones exposed to federal grazing allotments, H-2A labour and range predation, and the small flocks are largely not. Nothing in the Census identifies which permits or visas those twelve operations hold, so the exposure is inferred from scale rather than documented. Either way, 34 operations hold 86.6 percent of Idaho's sheep and the other 1,174 hold 13.4 percent, so a measure written for "the sheep industry" reaches two different sets of businesses.

What is killing Idaho's sheep and lambs

Idaho sheep producers lost 22,000 head of sheep and lambs to all causes in 2025, worth $5.73 million. Predators took 8,800 of them, worth $2.30 million. Coyotes alone took 6,200, which is 70 percent of the predator losses and 28 percent of every sheep and lamb death in the state.

USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service surveys Idaho death loss by cause at intervals and publishes each round as a standalone report. It is the only Idaho-specific source for the predator split and the only one for recent years; the national Sheep and Goats Death Loss reports carry Idaho cause tables for 2004 and 2009 and are listed in our dataset as unpulled. None of it is in Quick Stats. The surveys were run at the request of, and with funding from, the Idaho Animal Damage Control Board from 2018 on, and the Idaho Sheep and Goat Health Board for the 2016 round. The 2025 report was released on 2 April 2026.

The merged rows carry recomputed percentages. NASS publishes bears, mountain lions, foxes and eagles at 0.5 percent each and disease, poison and cast-on-back at 2.3, 1.4 and 0.9; summing its published percentages gives 40.2 and 60.1 rather than the 40.0 and 60.0 it also publishes, so the shares above are computed from head. Its non-predator value column runs $1,000 over its own subtotal. The 40 percent predator figure is a floor rather than a measurement, because NASS states the unknown causes line "may include some predator loss."

The trend: total losses falling, predator losses rising

Total deaths fell 22.8 percent across those nine years. Predator losses rose 31.3 percent and their value rose 68.5 percent, from $1.36 million to $2.30 million. The value of coyote losses alone rose 92.8 percent. Because the flock shrank, the per-1,000-head column understates none of it: predation intensity rose 42.5 percent.

Of 16,500 lamb deaths in 2025, 7,600 were predator kills, 46.1 percent. Of 5,500 adult sheep deaths, 1,200 were predator kills, 21.8 percent. Idaho's lamb crop fell 12.7 percent over roughly the same period, on a 14.9 percent smaller ewe base.

The long series behind those four years

Four survey years are not a trend line. The Quick Stats layer under them is continuous and runs 38 years, and on its own definition, deaths after docking, it moves the other way. Idaho's death rate per 1,000 head of 1 January inventory averaged 105.5 across 1988 to 1997 and 67.8 across 2016 to 2025, a 35.7 percent fall. It peaked at 121.3 in 1991 and reached 63.8 in 2025, matching 2022 for the lowest in the series. That layer carries no cause breakdown at all, which is the reason the four surveys exist.

What one federal program recorded doing about it

USDA APHIS Wildlife Services publishes its own activity by species and method in Program Data Report G. Idaho's rows for FY2014 through FY2024 are published alongside the loss data. Three things have to travel with any figure from it.

They are federal fiscal years, October through September, while the loss data is calendar year. They cover one program's own actions, so private trapping, county pest-district work under Idaho Code 25-2601, permit holders and landowner take are all outside them. And the method column is the capture or targeting method, which APHIS states "MAY NOT have been the method or tool used to kill, euthanize, or free/relocate."

Read the species rows, not the total. European starlings are 97.4 percent of everything Wildlife Services killed in Idaho across these eleven years, under a separate agricultural bird programme. "151,593 animals killed in FY2024" is technically the record and substantively describes starlings.

Three patterns run through the eleven years.

Aerial work is how this program takes coyotes here. Fixed wing and helicopter are never below 61.9 percent of recorded coyote take and reach 81.1 percent, and the last three years, 78.9, 81.1 and 80.2 percent, are the highest run in the record. The peak is FY2023, not the most recent year. House Bill 630, which would have allowed shooting coyotes, wolves and red foxes from aircraft under a different authority, failed in the Senate 6-28-1 in March 2026.

Recorded wolf take falls sharply after FY2020, from 82 to 39, 23, 27 and 21. The Legislature rewrote wolf depredation control and the taking of wolves in 2021, in Senate Bill 1211, chapter 307, which is in the legislative record on this site. Idaho Fish and Game reports state-managed wolf mortality separately, on its own series.

M-44 cyanide devices appear through FY2017 and are absent from FY2018 on, having accounted for 105, 105, 53 and 68 coyotes in the four years before that.

What Idaho funds against predator damage

Three mechanisms exist. Their statutory basis is clear and most of their annual amounts are not.

The state animal damage control board. Idaho Code 25-2612A creates it and makes the chairman of the Idaho sheep and goat health board its chairman by statute. It coordinates programs against predatory animals, rodents and birds injurious to animal husbandry, agriculture, horticulture, forestry, wildlife and human health, statewide and for all livestock. Its other members are an appointee of the president of the Idaho Cattle Association, the directors of Agriculture and of Fish and Game, and the chairmen of the five animal damage control districts.

The wolf control fund. The Idaho Wolf Depredation Control Board was created in 2014 and sits in the governor's office. Idaho Code 22-5306 requires the livestock industry to put $110,000 a year into the fund's livestock subaccount, collected jointly by the state brand inspector and the sheep and goat health board, and caps it there. Since fiscal year 2022 the state controller also transfers $300,000 a year from the fish and game fund, and the Fish and Game Commission directs how that portion is used, so the $410,000 total is not a single pot the wolf board controls. Two cents of the sheep board's per-pound wool assessment is designated as the sheep industry's share.

The sheep board's own assessment. Idaho Code 25-128 lets the board "designate a portion of the assessment" for "the prevention and control of damage caused by predatory animals and other vertebrate pests," and Idaho Code 25-131(9) requires any money raised that way to be spent, less administrative costs, in the districts comprising the counties where it was collected. That makes the wool assessment available as a standing state revenue stream for predator damage generally rather than only for wolves, distributed through the same five animal damage control districts whose chairmen sit on the state board.

County pest funds. Idaho Code 25-2601 through 25-2604 lets county commissioners declare any predatory animal, coyote included, an agricultural pest, levy up to 0.02 percent of market value for a county pest fund, and form pest control districts on the petition of 25 qualified electors per precinct. Local, optional, county property tax.

The three channels are documented to different degrees. Wolves have a named board, a statutory figure, and a designated 2 cents per pound. Coyotes caused $1.62 million of the $2.30 million in 2025 predator losses, roughly five times the $339,000 in the other-and-unknown category wolves sit inside, and are worked through mechanisms carrying no published annual figure. What portion of the 8-cent assessment the board designates for predator control, and how the districts allocate it, would appear in the income and expense report Idaho Code 25-156 requires the board to file each 15 January with the Senate and House Agricultural Affairs committees, the legislative council, the state controller and the division of financial management. Those reports are not pulled here.

Reading the death loss numbers without getting them wrong

Four things will trip up anyone citing this record, and all four are in the published dataset.

The two series count different things. Quick Stats carries an annual Idaho death-loss series back to 1988 and counts lamb deaths after docking only. The cause surveys also count lambs lost before docking. For 2025 the annual series reports 15,000 deaths and the survey reports 22,000. Both are correct on their own definition. Do not put them in the same column. Each survey report publishes the figure that reconciles them: 7,000 lambs were lost before docking in 2025, and 15,000 plus 7,000 is 22,000. The same identity holds in 2016 at 10,500, 2018 at 11,000 and 2023 at 7,500.

The surveys are irregular. Four Idaho years across a decade is not an annual series, and the gaps reflect when a round was funded rather than what happened on the range.

Wolves are broken out in some years and not others. They appear as their own line in 2016 at 800 head, 2018 at 800 and 2023 at 300. In 2025 NASS folds them into other and unknown predators alongside bobcats. Treating that absence as zero is the easiest mistake available here.

NASS rounds and does not force any column to add. Each cause is rounded to the nearest 100. In the 2023 report the head column falls 200 short of its own published subtotal, the value column runs $2,000 over it, and the percent column is 0.1 short; 2025 carries a $1,000 value residual. Our dataset publishes both residuals per year rather than absorbing them.

The Idaho sheep and goat health board, and who nominates it

Title 25 of the Idaho Code is titled Animals. Its first chapter is Control of Sheep Diseases, and that chapter is still the operative law on sheep disease in the state.

The Idaho sheep and goat health board was created in 1951. It sits inside the Department of Agriculture, but Idaho Code 25-126 provides that its officers and employees "shall not be subject to the administrative control of the director." Section 25-127 sets membership at five, all experienced wool growers or goat raisers, no two from the same county, on six-year terms. The same section then provides:

As vacancies occur upon the board, the Idaho wool growers association shall submit to the governor the names of two (2) persons qualified and suitable for appointment for each such vacancy from whom the governor shall make his appointment to fill such vacancies.

A private trade association nominates and the governor appoints from its list. That is a statutory role, not a custom.

The two wool assessments, and who sets the rates

Section 25-131 authorises up to 12 cents per pound on wool sold through commercial channels, in the grease. The rate in force is set by rule, and IDAPA 02.08.01 puts it at 8 cents per pound, with goats at 80 cents per head, both effective 23 March 2023. The assessment is levied on the producer but deducted by the first purchaser, who must state the amount withheld and remit quarterly; late remittance carries 5 percent for the first month and 1 percent thereafter. It is a lien on the wool ahead of all other liens except those a statute declares prior. Two cents of that 8 is the wolf control assessment, so a quarter of the health board's assessment is designated for wolf control rather than for sheep disease.

A second assessment sits on top. The Sheep, Lamb and Wool Promotion, Research and Education Act, sections 25-153 through 25-160, added in 1998, levies up to another 4 cents per pound. Section 25-159 says that one is "collected in the amount authorized by the Idaho wool growers association," and section 25-155 lets the board contract with the association to administer the programme.

The promotion act took effect only because producers voted it in, on a ballot asking whether they favoured a programme "funded by all producers with no refund provision." Section 25-160 keeps that door open: the Department of Agriculture must run a new referendum on a petition from 10 percent or more of the producers who paid an assessment in either of the two preceding calendar years, or on written request of the board. The eligible pool is producers who actually paid, which is not published and is smaller than the 1,208 operations the Census counts, since the assessment falls on wool sold through commercial channels and excludes casual sales.

Grazing allotments and the Taylor Grazing Act in Idaho law

Congress passed the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934, and federal grazing preference is the asset a range sheep operation is built on. Idaho legislated its own position in 1998, at Idaho Code sections 25-901 through 25-903.

Section 25-901 declares a grazing preference right "an appurtenance of the base property through which the grazing preference is maintained," which is the theory under which allotments transfer with the ranch. Section 25-902 says a person taking that preference through sale or rental of base property cannot later be deprived of it without consent and without just compensation. Section 25-903 makes willful or negligent interference with legal herding, grazing or pasturing, or with a fence, gate, water development or other range improvement on private base property or an adjudicated allotment, a misdemeanour carrying restitution.

Domestic sheep, bighorn sheep, and the limit of a state statute

Disease transmission between domestic sheep and bighorn sheep is what the 2009 statute and the litigation below are about. Contact can be fatal to bighorn herds, and the remedy sought is separation, which means closing grazing allotments.

As the Ninth Circuit summarised the record, pneumonia-causing bacteria are common in domestic sheep, where the worst outbreaks kill about 2.5 percent of a herd. In bighorn the same organisms are catastrophic: die-offs kill most or all of a population, and ewes that survive experience low reproduction and high lamb mortality for years. Episodic pneumonia outbreaks are, on that record, the current limiting factor on bighorn abundance and distribution.

Idaho legislated in 2009. Senate Bill 1175 passed the Senate 27-7-1 and the House 51-17-2 and was vetoed on 25 April 2009. A replacement, Senate Bill 1232, was introduced on 24 April while Senate Bill 1175 was still on the governor's desk, moved with rules suspended in both chambers, passed 26-8-1 and 47-20-3, and was signed on 7 May 2009 as chapter 314. Thirteen days from introduction to signature.

What it put in section 36-106(e) is a declaration of state policy:

It is the policy of the state of Idaho that existing sheep or livestock operations in the area of any bighorn sheep transplant or relocation are recognized and that the potential risk, if any, of disease transmission and loss of bighorn sheep when the same invade domestic livestock or sheep operations is accepted.

Before transplanting bighorn into areas they do not now inhabit, the statute requires Fish and Game to notify county commissioners and affected grazing permittees, grant a hearing on written request, and obtain a signed written agreement from all responsible federal, state and private entities acknowledging that acceptance of risk. It also requires a bighorn management plan accounting for existing domestic sheep allotments, and a director's certification that the disease transmission risk is acceptable once best management practices are implemented.

In 2010 the Payette National Forest closed roughly 70 percent of the allotments on which domestic sheep grazing had been permitted, having concluded there was significant risk of fatal disease to the small and insular bighorn populations there. The Idaho Wool Growers Association, the American Sheep Industry Association, the Public Lands Council, the Wyoming and Colorado wool growers, and two sheep operations, Carlson Company, Inc. and Shirts Brothers Sheep, challenged it. They lost in the District of Idaho and lost on appeal in Idaho Wool Growers Ass'n v. Vilsack, decided 2 March 2016, where the Ninth Circuit held any failure to consult the Agricultural Research Service was harmless and the Forest Service had not acted arbitrarily or capriciously.

Idaho has declared in statute that the risk is accepted and that a federal grazing preference is an appurtenance of private property. The Payette closure and its affirmance on appeal are what those declarations met on federal land.

The H-2A sheepherder wage

Herding or production of livestock on the range is the only occupation with a national monthly H-2A wage rather than a state hourly one. The adverse effect wage rate for range occupations is $2,132.41 per month effective 3 February 2026, up from $2,058.31, set by Federal Register notice of 20 January 2026 on a 3.6 percent twelve-month change in the Employment Cost Index under 20 CFR 655.211(c)(2). That is $25,588.92 a year, and it rose 7.3 percent over two years.

Two qualifications apply. The AEWR is the same figure in every state, but 20 CFR 655.211 requires the employer to pay the highest of the AEWR, any applicable collective bargaining wage, and any applicable federal or state minimum, so the rate is uniform while the wage floor is not: California's sheepherder minimum is several times this. And the Department of Labor's October 2025 rule introducing wage "skill levels" applies to non-range occupations only, so the pending challenge to it, United Farm Workers v. U.S. Department of Labor in the Eastern District of California where a preliminary injunction was denied on 14 May 2026, does not reach sheepherder wages.

What to watch in Idaho in 2026

Predator control authority. House Bill 630 would have provided for shooting coyotes, wolves and red foxes from aircraft. It passed the House 60-8-2 on 24 February and failed in the Senate 6-28-1 on 25 March.

Depredation claims. Senate Joint Memorial 108, calling on the federal government to protect Idaho citizens who file depredation claims, was adopted by both chambers in February 2026. House Bill 651, revising how depredation claims are paid, died. Both are in the legislative record.

The assessment referendum. The 10 percent petition threshold in section 25-160 is the mechanism by which the promotion assessment gets reopened.

The next cause survey. It happens when the Animal Damage Control Board funds one. The annual death-loss totals arrive each January with the NASS Sheep and Goats release regardless.

The wool and lamb price benchmarks. Neither is stated on this page. The Australian Wool Exchange publishes an Eastern Market Indicator weekly and USDA Agricultural Marketing Service carries current lamb prices; those are where a current number lives.