THE Stanton family have risen from the ashes to hold a successful ram sale less than a year after losing almost everything in last summer's horror bushfires on Kangaroo Island.
The family lost three farms, housing, infrastructure, pets and well over 4000 head of sheep and cattle.
The 2020 Stokes Bay Genetics ram sale saw 80 Poll Dorset rams offered, made up of 20 surviving 2018-drop rams, as well as 60 rams from Majardah Rams stud, Glencoe, Mount Gambier.
Tim Buck of Buck Pastoral, Gosse, purchased two rams for the sale's top price of $2100, taking home five rams in total.
The volume buyer with 13 rams was Zach Trethewey of KI Prime Livestock at Parndana, who took home the Startect drench prize.
Other prominent buyers were the Tremaines with seven rams, the Pledges with six rams and Ivan Read also with six rams.
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Principal Michael Stanton at the start of the auction welcomed all those present.
"Thank-you for coming, your support really means a lot and it was hard to believe we were going to hold a sale today," he said.
Mr Stanton said the Majardah rams had similar breeding, high muscle, high Lambplan WEC figures and low birth weight.
"We've got a lot of faith going forward and that we've got plenty of numbers and all the ewe lambs survived, we've got 218 lambs on the ground now so we will be able to go ahead as normal next year," he said.
And in huge news for the operation, Stokes Bay Genetics has just bought the leading ram on all of LambPlan - Bruan 19-275 with a PWWT 21.2 and TCP 178.5
"We will continue to breed high performing terminal rams," Mr Stanton said.