A New Zealand vineyard planning to reduce its carbon footprint has sparked a sheep-breed shortage of tiny sheep in Australia.

Yealands Estate in the Awatere Valley  of Marlborough has been investing in Olde English Southdowns, better known as Babydoll Sheep, for the past 2 years, as an alternative to the lawn mower.

The little sheep, first bred in Sussex, England, some 200 years ago, aren’t tall enough to reach the fruit on the vines.

Vineyard pioneer Peter Yealand, head of the family-owned estate and long-time advocate for sustainability  says importing Babydoll sheep from New South Wales is one of the many steps towards the future of his ground-breaking organic vineyard.

"Basically to cut our carbon footprint, we’ve got 2 and a half thousand acres. In a normal season you would have to mow that 8 times so putting the sheep in eliminates the need to have tractors running around your vineyard.

"It safes me about $1.5 million a year on operating costs and substantially reduces our carbon footprint, because its diesel that’s our biggest user of carbon."

Peter Yealand has put babydolls on the map in New Zealand, and hopes to develop a flock of ten thousand pure, and cross bred, babydolls.

"We’re the first wine company in NZ to be carbon zero from the start up, and having sheep to keep your weeds down is like magic.

"We’ve got a thousand odd here now, not all pure breeds but going forward we hope to run about 10,000 here.

"There is a lot of other interest from other vineyards to go down this same path”.

And for lovers of lamb meat, plans to process these sheep for the supermarket shelves are also on Peter Yealand’s agenda.

I’m hoping and I’ve been encouraged from people, seeking enquiry to look at marketing these as a niece products, my plans are to take this to one of the bigger chains, maybe try the NZ market through a delicatessen , and then perhaps in the UK as a high end organic product”.