WHEN the British Charollais Sheep Society decided to introduce an entirely new method of show judging with a top sale of premium rams, Worcester Livestock Market was their chosen venue.

Traditionally a leading judge on his own would have ranked the entrants and awarded the prizes.

But on Friday, July 4, a team of trained assessors painstakingly each scored eight different physical attributes of each ram as well as making an overall assessment. The new method of pooling the opinions of a team minimises the likelihood of bias, for every top judge must have strong personal preference for certain attributes of each animal he examines.

The sale next day conducted by auctioneer Clive Roads, of McCartneys, produced a sensational average price of £1,034.36 for 100 rams sold. This level had never been achieved for the breed before and showed the confidence of commercial sheep producers as well as breeders in the Charollais, which is now the third most popular ram for crossing. This has been achieved only 26 years after the first Charollais were imported into this country.

Among the keen bidders were Derek Daffurn and his daughter Jennifer Curtis, from Wickhamford, near Evesham. They paid 3,300 guineas for the ram lamb Trevadlock Dynamite from Eric Sleep's flock in Cornwall.

Topping the sale at 5,000 guineas was a ram lamb from Aberdeenshire and it was destined for a flock in Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland.

Jonathan Barber, chief executive of the British Charollais Sheep Society, who farms at Wymondham, Norfolk, said: "It was fantastic to see the enthusiasm and confidence in breeders to get on and bid for the rams they wanted. The Charollais qualities of length coupled with tremendous fleshing was evident right through the sale and this was highlighted by our new evaluation system."

It remains to be seen whether other breed societies may be inclined to adopt a similar team method of judging livestock. It certainly has the merit of putting the emphasis on the commercial qualities of the breed, aiming for the ideal end product favoured by the consumer, and not to be distracted by encouraging fancy breed points.

The scoring system provides the framework to ensure the right balance.

Last weekend, there was a tremendous turnout for the Suffolk Sheep Society's National Show and Sale at Worcester Market, where the show judge David Calvert praised the high quality of the classes as "tremendous right through".

"The Suffolk is the breed of the future. It is better fleshed than a few years ago and the head is not so coarse. I think we shall see a lot of commercial men return to the Suffolk," he said.

The Show Champion, which was also this year's Royal Show Champion, was the ram lamb of Geoff Biddulph, of Macclesfield. It was purchased by Worcestershire farmer Mike Attwell for 3,400 guineas.

But it was the noted Worcestershire flockmaster, John Sinnett of Stockton Court, Stockton-on-Teme, who once again topped the sale. His shorn ram lamb achieved the top price of 15,000 guineas, paid by Kenny and Barclay Mair of Turriff, Aberdeenshire.

The overall show average as £1,315, some £200 more than a year ago, an encouragement for Suffolk flock owners. The Suffolk can justify its place as the first choice crossing ram.

Worcestershire and sheep seem to go together. We have the National Sheep Association (NSA) with its headquarters by the Three Counties Showground at Malvern and now the National Scrapie Plan is administered from the Defra (formerly MAFF) centre at Worcester, serving the whole of Great Britain.

Scrapie, like BSE, is one of the group of diseases known as Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs). The aim of the National Scrapie Plan (NSP) is to increase the level of resistance to TSEs in the national sheep flock, to the extent eventually to eradicate them all.

The plan enables flock owners of pure breeds to have their sheep blood tested and genotyped to select for the greatest resistance to scrapie and to eliminate susceptible types.

Leading the team at Worcester is Mike Dawson, national veterinary adviser for scrapie. He was at the Charollais sale, together with Francis Marlow from Defra's London HQ. Lindsey Halford, looking after the administration at Worcester, was also there to brief farmers about the plan.