BALLYHIVISTOCK ROUGE

The pedigree rouge flock was started in the early 2002 this seemed like a natural progression as we already used rouge rams on most of our texel shearling ewes and the commercial texel ewes. We had been doing this with great success from the mid-1990’s with good quality commercial lambs regularly averaging over 24kgs dead weight and on an annual basis in excess of 60% E3’s with the remainder being U-grade 3’s & 4L’s since using this cross.

The females out of this cross are always in great demand due to the quality of lambs they have, their prolificy, ease of lambing and mothering ability. Some are sold to the meat plant if we feel the price is too high to realistically ask someone to pay for a ewe lamb the remainder are sold privately for breeding and a few are kept in the commercial flock to be put back to a texel ram.

The main aim of the pedigree enterprise was to be a small high quality flock as although we feel there is a market for rouge rams it is much more limited than the texel market.

The flock now numbers eight ewes, we are aiming for a maximum of ten eventually, the current stock ram is Kinsella Defender a five year old ram.

Although we have sold two or three rouge ram lambs per year privately since the flock was started, 2008 was the first year we went to a sale. We took one ram lamb, a triplet son of Defender, to the Rouge sale at Ballymena Mart and it stood third in the show and subsequently sold for the evenings top price of 500gns (the third highest price for a rouge ram in N.I. 2008).  In 2008 we purchased a new stock ram, Glengalliagh Hamish, at the rouge premier sale in Dungannon. He has turned out very well and was judged the top rouge shearling ram in N.I. 2009 winning the shearling ram goblet.

In 2009 we kept 3 ram lambs and took them all to the rouge sale at Ballymena Mart, we got third place with a Glengalliagh Hamish son and got the top price on the night of 380gns for a Kinsella Defender son which had been fifth place in the show.

In 2010 we kept 4 ram lambs, all of which were by Glengalliagh Hamish. We took the favourite and third favourite to the sale at Ballymena and achieved our best show position to date with our top lamb being the pre-show Supreme Champion and later going on to sell for 400gns with the other lamb selling for 320gns. The other two lambs were taken to a multi-breed sale at Kilrea where they sold for 300gns and 150gns respectively.

2011 was another successful year for the rouge flock. We only kept three ram lambs, the best of which we sold in the yard to Gerard Cassley privately during the first week of July. The second best lamb, Lord of the Ring, was taken to the Rouge sale at Ballymena where he stood first in the ram lamb class and later sold for the top price of 600gns to Karen and Leslie Beacom who two years previously had bought the Texel ram Ballyhivistock Popstar for 2,800gns. The final lamb was sold at the multi-breed sale in Kilrea where he made the top price for a rouge that night of 390gns. Below is a picture of Lord of the Ring:

We also said goodbye to the father of these rams Glegalliagh Hamish as he is the father of most of our females.

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