BUYERS scored plenty of bargains at Canowie Poll Merino stud's annual ram sale at Coonalpyn last Friday in its first year under new ownership.
In February, CC Cooper & Co from Jamestown who have been long-time buyers at Australia's oldest Poll Merino stud purchased it from Ken Sawers- the third generation of the Sawers family to run it.
However with the Coopers switching from volume buyers to the sale's vendor it left a hole in the buying gallery.
Seventeen of 53 rams found homes with six buyers for a $1288 average.
The sale started strongly with lot 1- a 20.4 micron ram described by Elders stud stock auctioneer Tom Penna as a "top end all rounder" making $3200.
The ram with a greasy fleece weight 16 per cent higher than the flock average was bought by RG Cox, Kingscote, with Elders' Laryn Gogel taking the phone bid.
The $3200 sale high was equalled at lot 13 when a 20M ram with wool measurements of 3.1 standard deviation, 15.3pc coefficient of variation and comfort factor of 99.7pc
The successful buyers were DP&VL Jacobs, Coonalpyn, who have been Canowie clients for about five years. They bought three rams.
"The Canowie sheep handle the conditions when things get tough," Damian Jacobs said.
Kintalpa Partners, Kingston SE, were the volume buyer with four rams each at $1000.
Mr Penna was impressed with the presentation of the line-up and said they represented "terrific value".
"They have good bone and barrel for paddock run sheep that have not seen an ounce of grain," he said.
"I was surprised by the density of the wool on the sheep, they are well covered but they can still handle the rain- they are as clean as a whistle on the shoulder."
Stud principal Seth Cooper said they were pleased with the sale average but would have liked to sell a few more rams on sale day. They have already made further sales this week.
Into the future he said they would remain commercially focused. A key trait they would focus on in the stud was using genomics to determine ewe lifetime productivity, both the number of lambs and wool cut of each ewe.
"Surplus sheep sales are a critical part of any sheep operation, you can't just rely on the wool," he said.
"Rather than only measuring wool weight once we will be measuring wool cut every year and DNA testing every lamb in the cradle to determine how many lambs each ewe has had."
