I spoke last time about maybe getting on and weaning lambs early – Here we are a month later and we’re just in the middle of it!

Some things have gotten in the way, but there has also been an abundance of feed which has not created any urgency.

The main thing going on is Ram Sales. As I write, seven days will see us watching the dust settle (or more likely the ripples settle on the puddles). Catalogues have been collated, printed and sent out; tups have had numbers stamped on their backs (bulls just got their lugs clipped); the ring is set up and clean sawdust on the floor; there’s been hundreds of pictures and scores of videos taken.

Between now and then, there are videos to edit; we have a viewing day; I’d like to wash some faces and tails; and there’s probably a cake or two to bake.

Put like that, it sounds as though it’s coming together, although it doesn’t feel like it. This will be our 16th on-farm sale. Some things have become old-hat, but other things continually evolve.

It started off with the impending closure of Perth Mart and a desire to sell rams more naturally done. We tied up some gates in an old shed, set up some straw bales and cajoled an auctioneer along. With not much to lose, we were blown away when previous buyers, neighbours and friends filled the ring and we sold almost 50 rams. I seem to remember there was quite a lot of whisky involved at that sale!

This time there are twice as many rams and 20 bulls. Someone asked me once – ‘what would you do if you knew you would succeed?’, which started the ball rolling for the bull sale – a more recent addition.

The gamble is that most herds don’t want a bull until the spring, but a spring-born bull calf can be nicely wintered on a store-bull silage ration and then have the summer at grass to develop into a 16-17-month-old young sire that hasn’t been pushed. So, the timing is right for the bull, and he is mature enough that he doesn’t need a fancy winter.

Most buyers have found that the bull has time to settle into his new surroundings before winter; maybe run with a handful of cull cows to make sure everything is functioning as it ought to; and take the pressure off during the busy spring.

The winning stakes, if it is a gamble, are that the pick is on offer and you might get a top bull for a much lower value than in the spring!

During Covid we went on-line and continue to use the hybrid Yourbid system. I have studied bull-sale systems for a long time, and came across a guy called Steve Radakovich in Iowa, who ran his bull sale on the back of a cornflake packet. It was a really clever system and it worked for his 40 bulls with buyers from all over the States. Yourbid works the same way, but the technology put together by George Giddings (an Angus breeder from New Zealand), makes it a bit slicker.

I had an interesting discussion about bull purchasing behaviour with a guy called John Chapman from Inverary Station, just where the Southern Alps rise up from the Canterbury Plain. Bulls are basically all sold on-farm in New Zealand, and John pointed out that the most important genetic selection decision that anyone could make was in deciding which bull sale to attend. And this decision, he explained, could be made – rationally – at home, sitting around the kitchen table.

The buyer then attended the sale, stood amongst his peers and had to act publicly in a way he was unused to, and probably a little unsure about the decision he was making. In the buzz of the sale, he then acts irrationally and latches onto something easy – probably the big one that everyone else is bidding on. But in John’s opinion, so long as he made a good rational decision in what sale to attend, he couldn’t go too far wrong.

That was in the back of my mind last week. I didn’t go to the Lanark Texel sale. It’s not that I don’t like the sheep. It’s more that – to the rational mind – some of our breeding goals don’t match, and I know that if I go, I’ll fall in love with something and do my irrational thing and bid on something I shouldn’t.

I went up to the Fearn sale instead. Their Texel programme aligns with ours and I spent some time at the kitchen table studying figures, pedigrees and checking up on how many crops the mother and granny have brought home. Between that and having a glance at the videos I had a short-list of four rams to have a look at. Arriving at the farm, I was very pleased with the ram at the top of the list and set about bidding for him.

Then ‘ram-sale fever’ set in, and I got my eye on another tup that wasn’t on the list at all. But there was just something about him!

Long and the short of it is, we came home with two tups – the rational one and the irrational one. I’ll keep you updated, but the guys at home all like the second one better at the moment!

We put second cut (mostly arable silage), on the top of the pit and took the chance to take a sample of the first cut – 31% DM, D-Value 68, Protein 11.5, ME 10.8 – which I think means it was dry and well wilted when we cut it, but we should have been a week earlier to get these later numbers up a bit.

This silage will form the base of our growing cattle diet and then calving cows in the spring, so the higher the quality, the less need for supplementation.

Guillaume, our French student, has worked out just fine – and his English has fairly come on. It turned out after about a week that we had his name pronounced all wrong – it’s more like Gui’em …as in Gui’em Laldie! He’s been a great help with ram sale set-up, he’s learned a little about the relationship between sheep, flies and maggots that doesn’t seem to be a problem in the South of France, and it turns out that he’s a pretty astute judge of a good Texel.

There’s nothing can match good stockmanship at this game. There are three lessons in stockmanship to keep in mind as you get into tup sale season:

First – ‘take the man away from the beast’. You need to make a judgement over how much you are seeing is genetics and how much is environment – you are buying the ram, not the farm or the feed bucket. That is the aim of the BLUP system of course – the intelligence behind EBVs – so figures can help you work that out.

Second – ‘better with an average one out of a good pen, than a good one out of a poor pen’. If a tup’s brothers are all good, it should give you a bit more confidence that he’ll breed well. This is the founding principle of EBVs – how an animals relations all stack up, and where he fits in the pecking order.

Thirdly – and there are no figures to help you here. There are a whole lot of words for it, but no definitive description. It’s – type – or balance, masculinity, character, style, breediness, sexual dimorphism, hormonal balance – call it what you like, but it’s the ‘je ne sais quoi’ factor that sets the great ones apart from the rest. How am I going to explain that in French?!!

Hope you find the right ram – and if you do, gui’em laldie at the bidding!