“WHAT I’m looking for is consistency.”

Taking his time walking past pens of Five and Three rams at Sheepvention was Wool Monarch and judge, Tom Silcock, and he was sure of the attributes that would give a breeder the 2022 awards for the two categories.

“(Also) wool quality, production, confirmation – confirmation is how well they stand, you don’t buy a car if it hasn’t got wheels under it,” he said.

“That’s the basics of it.”

With years of expertise in the industry, Tom places emphasis on a number of traits such as feet – “our industry is full of sheep with bad feet” and expected the best sheep “to stand like a kitchen table”.

“Equal to that is the fundamentals of having good testicles and a good mouth and good structure,” he said.

“That way, they’ll carry the body and they’ll be able to serve ewes well.

“(It’s) no good having a fantastic fleece of wool with really great quality on a really bad frame.

“I always start with those fundamentals of structure and conformation and work my way up.”

The quadratic, almost chiselled model he was looking for was not just an aesthetic criterium, it had practical considerations for the breeding.

“Important is a really good square bum on them,” Tom said.

“The ewe’s actually got to get a lamb out of that pelvis.

“If you’ve got what we call a bullet arse or a tapered arse, it’s not structurally well-designed to give birth. Again, if the shoulders are too wide, they’re bound to have difficultly giving birth - the lambs will be too wide in the shoulders.

“So you just want that all-round square structure like a kitchen table on his feet, with as much wool as you can have without getting heavy skinned or short stapled - I love the term long free-growing quality wool, that’s what I’m looking for, and as much of it as I can.”

Tom said, “you can never have too much quality” and he was a great believer in modern-day measurement, but the changes to this year’s event had altered how the judges approached the event.

“Historically, we used to also judge the best sale ram, and we’re not doing that this year,” he said.

“To judge a pen of five means that they actually need to represent some consistency and a lot of the teams that won’t actually make the final call out - they’ve got two or three really great rams, but the rest of the team lets them down.

“One or two can’t carry a pen of five, you need a pen of five.”

Tom admitted the show ring – which pen of five was just an extension of – and their breeding values weren’t always a guarantee of a year-round performing ram, but “an animal that might win in the show ring has got to be a good animal”.

“That doesn’t mean to say it will necessarily breed good sheep and that’s where I will get myself into trouble with some people,” he said.

“But you need to know the background of it and how it was bred.

“Breeding values are a better predictor of what an animal can do, but it also has to look the part.

“I want it all - I want it to look the part but I also want it to have good breeding values.

“(It) gives a much greater prediction of what an animal is capable of, rather than its individual traits.”

In view of this, Tom said he has a clear approach of how he ‘weights’ his assessments.

“In this case, I’m not looking at (genetics) because that’s not necessarily my job description,” he said.

“My job description is to pick out the visually best-looking animals that have got all the traits that I believe are the best.

“But some of that stuff you can’t do without measuring it.”

Tom said getting the balance right between a visual assessment and the science was important.

“It’s becoming more scientific all the time,” he said.

“But the people that are just too focused on the science and the measurement fall over very quickly because they haven’t got the fundamentals, they haven’t got ‘wheels on the car’ - you’ve got to have both - you can’t have one without the other, or you won’t last long.

“It’s a matter of getting that combination of everything and I’ve been telling people for a long time I want it all and people tell me, you can’t have it all.

“I’m saying yes, you can and we’re getting closer to it all the time.

“It’s such an exciting industry to be in at the moment.”