Mid-West SheepMaster sale includes rams and ewes at new Carnamah venue

The second annual Mid-West SheepMaster Ram Auction will take place at the Carnamah Ram Shed on October 7 at 1pm.

The sale, conducted by Elders and interfaced with AuctionsPlus will offer 70 certified SheepMaster rams and 70 ewes from three accredited studs including Walkaway-based ‘Rainbows Rest’, along with ‘Mogumber Plains’ and Gingin-based ‘Northern Valleys’ studs.

SheepMaster special stud sire Monarch will be on display at Carnamah.

This elite sire was sold at the National SheepMaster Sale last year for $90,000 to Rainbows Rest stud and has been used extensively throughout Australia and New Zealand.

Elders WA stud stock shedding sheep specialist Andrew Hodgson said the SheepMaster breed was created for tough Australian conditions and “to put money into producer’s pockets”.

“They provide walkability, high fertility and outstanding mothering, are clean shedding and easy to manage, with some producers now not tailing lambs at all,” he said.

“These hardy clean-skin sheep are productive in all conditions and are drought tolerant and tick resistant.”

Mr Hodgson said sheep producer faced some big issues including labour shortages, rising farm cost of production, increased occupation, health and safety protocols and animal welfare considerations.

“Running SheepMasters can address many of these issues and allow for the ethical and efficient production of sheepmeat, with some producers now going close to weaning at ewes body weight in a 12-month period through three lambings in two years,” he said.

“A sheepmeat operation’s biggest profit driver is the number of lambs or kilograms of lambs weaned per hectare and combined with reduced costs of production — this maternal breed offers producers a great option.”

Mr Hodgson said the highly fertile and full shedding rams available at Carnamah would benefit any large-scale commercial sheepmeat enterprise.

The record-smashing sale of SheepMaster special stud sire Monarch sent the bush telegraph into overdrive last year.

It broke WA’s previous record of $51,500, paid just a month price for an “UltraWhite” self shedding sheep sold by Dawson Bradford’s Hillcroft Farms at Narrogin to the Kingslane stud near Bunbury.

Weighing a whopping 148kg — two to three times the size of an average sheep — Mr Garnett said Monarch 384 stands as big as a Shetland Pony.

Australian wool industry legend Neil Garnett spent 25 years developing the new breed of sheep called SheepMaster.

He launched the breed in 2017 after spending more than two decades breeding the wool off the sheep’s back in pursuit of an easy care, highly fertile animal for food rather than fibre.

SheepMaster has been touted as a composite of eight different meat sheep breeds including the Damara and Dorper, for which he was part of the first group to import embryos into Australia in the early 1990s.