This Friday the Border Union Agricultural Society will hold its 178th annual ram sale in Springwood Park, Kelso when 8 auction companies will offer 5200 rams for sale through 16 auction rings. The event is big business and is considered to be the biggest one-day sale of rams in the world, with between 500 and 600 consignors from all over the UK and Eire bringing rams.
To give you an idea of the size of the sale, it grossed a record £2.922m in 2014 when 4271 rams out of the 4970 on offer sold for an average price of £684. Mind you, the record number for sale was set in 1998 when 7,730 went under the auctioneer's hammer.
The Kelso ram sale started in a very small way in 1836, mostly with breeders letting their rams for a season by private treaty. This method of selling was deemed unfair to those buyers who weren't locals, so the first auction sale took place in 1838 with three auctioneers selling 120 Border Leicester and Cheviot rams, many for £3-£4 each. This was probably the first auction of rams in the world.
Nowadays the rams are penned in long marquees with 16 auction rings at the ends. Those rings are numbered from 1 to 19 but, with a deferential nod to superstition, there has never been a number 13. This year numbers 6 and 11 are also missing for different reasons.
Although the event is regarded principally as a top commercial, multi-breed sale, many of the rams on offer are bought for pedigree use.
One notable Texel shearling (a ram that has been shorn for the first time) made the sale's record price of £35,000 in 2014, smashing the previous record of £23,000, attained in 1992 for a Suffolk ram lamb.
As I said, most of the rams at the event will be bought for use in commercial flocks to produce lambs mainly for slaughter. The buyers are more interested in the rams genetics and breeding data like EBVs (estimated breeding values), than show-ring looks of a "bold" appearance, soft hair, a glint in the eye, or the "set of the lugs" that pedigree breeders often get excited about.
Pedigree sheep can make staggering sums, like the 8-months-old Texel ram lamb that sold for £231,000 in 2009 at a sale in Lanark, or the £160,000 paid for a similar-aged Blackface ram lamb at a sale in Dalmally last year.
How anyone can justify spending that kind of money on a Blackface lamb with little genetic information to back him up, defeats me. Anyway, such pedigree breeders aren't daft and go about their business in their own way.
Back in the real world of commercial breeders, many now want performance recorded rams. It is vitally important to identify rams with superior genetic merit (breeding potential), as their genes are the only attribute that will pass from one generation to the next. Trials have shown that recorded rams can be worth an extra £800 over their working lives. Progeny by recorded rams are heavier, reach slaughter weight more quickly and have superior carcase conformation.
EBVs provide a measure of the breeding potential of an animal for a specific trait, and take into account performance data collected on known relatives.
The sort of things that are recorded are growth rates to 8 weeks and 21 weeks of age, the fat depth on the back measured at 21 weeks of age by an ultra-sound scan, as well as muscle yield, leanness and carcase shape using Computed Tomography (CT) imaging.
Having bought and paid for your rams there used to be an unholy scramble to gather them up from the different pens in the different marquees. Once you had your bunch assembled, you then had to walk them across the show-field to where your lorry or livestock trailer was parked, without allowing any to escape or mix with other bunches. Easier said than done - the whole operation inevitably turned into mayhem.
Nowadays each ram has an individual number painted on its fleece ranging from 1 to 5200. Better still, the organisers have set up a ram "taxi" service that costs about £8,000 to run and is paid for partly by a buyer's premium of £1 per ram.
The idea is that taxi drivers, under your direction, collect your rams with a small livestock trailer towed by an ATV, and deliver them without any hassle to your vehicle.
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