Prices at the Mule sale varied from about £140 to £240. This pen of fourteen sucked sheep cost £220, and some of that costliness is undoubtedly attributable to good looks. If I stuck to pure business economics, I would estimate that somewhere in the region of £175/£180 might strike a balance between quality and commercial reality?
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Due to my interpretation of the recent trade in breeding sheep, I reckoned that Mule hoggets would probably cost two and a half fat lambs (at current deadweight prices).
This situation didn’t strike me as making much financial sense, so I had retained mostly Texel x Mule ewe lambs that had been earmarked at birth as potentially suitable, and made up my mind to only buy one pen of Mules. How wrong can you be?
Almost 5,000 sheep were presented at the second of this year’s breeding sales in Ballymena, and trade was well back from the monstrous prices recorded a year ago.
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Due to my interpretation of the recent trade in breeding sheep, I reckoned that Mule hoggets would probably cost two and a half fat lambs (at current deadweight prices).
This situation didn’t strike me as making much financial sense, so I had retained mostly Texel x Mule ewe lambs that had been earmarked at birth as potentially suitable, and made up my mind to only buy one pen of Mules. How wrong can you be?
Almost 5,000 sheep were presented at the second of this year’s breeding sales in Ballymena, and trade was well back from the monstrous prices recorded a year ago.
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