Terrick West trio come up trumps in Fibre Meat Plus class
Interstate studs took out five of the top six placings in the prestigious Fibre Meat Plus class, which is always one of the biggest classes in the Merino showing at the Royal Adelaide Show.
A Terrick West ram exhibited by the McGauchie family, Prairie, was the winner in the March shorn class which is judged subjectively by both a wool and carcase judge, as well as points being allocated from wool tests and carcase scans.
Claire McGauchie said there were a lot of really good sheep in the class of 36 entries so to be in the top ten was a big honour, let alone finishing first and second.
Terrick West also had its first aggregate win (for the highest scoring three rams).
"We put a big emphasis on the carcase quality of our sheep and this ram really represents this," she said.
"A lot of our clients join their ewes to breed first cross lambs so we want the carcase it gives us and our clients the two different income avenues - meat and wool."
The winning individual had a great testing fleece of 18.7 micron, 2.4 standard deviation, 12.9 coefficient of variation and 99.9 per cent comfort factor, but also had the carcase qualities, weighing 131 kilograms, and a sensational 46.2 millimetre eye muscle depth and 8.8mm fat depth. The ram scored 80.7 points from a possible 100.
Runner-up- just 0.4 points behind- was another Terrick West ram, TW240342.
These two rams had been grand champion and reserve grand champion at the recent Dubbo Show.
The Fibre Meat Plus class winner went on the following day to top the Adelaide Merino ram sale at $20,000, while the second-placed ram, which the McGauchies planned to retain in the stud, was sold in a private deal for $80,000.
Terrick West's other ram in the trio, TW240283, had already been sold to Austral-Eden stud, West Wyalong, NSW, for $12,000.
Third place in the Fibre Meat Plus class went to the medium wool ram from Poll Boonoke, Deniliquin, NSW, which was also the grand champion March-shorn Poll Merino and is being retained by the stud.
Nutrien SA stud stock manager Gordon Wood said they were proud to be the sponsor of the class, giving $2500 to the winning individual and $1000 to the winning team.
He was committed to tweaking the commercially-orientated class as new technology became available.
"About 20 years ago scanning for eye muscle and fat was something fairly new, and that is where the idea of the class comes from - we want to keep tweaking that and hope we may be able to incorporate performance data too to keep the industry progressing," he said.
