Boys for sale

For my last day on wool duty, I went to Wellington to observe a ram auction, wherein stud breeders sell their 2-year-old boy rams to other farmers who believe the rams' DNA will help them yield better wool, meat or both. About 10 farms were represented, each with a pen of 12 rams or so.

I saw the farmers whom I'd met in my previous two days and they, their wives and their children welcomed me like an old friend. It was very much a family outing where kids gleefully chased each other around, wives caught up and gossiped, and the men talked shop (or sheep, in this case).

For the first part of the day, prospective buyers went around the pens to inspect each ram and to chat with the stud raisers, thinking about which sheep to bid on. Bidders pulled wool apart, checked out the rams' hindquarters, pat their backs and checked to see how loose their skin was.

Each ram had a card that described different attributes of wool type, "carcass" type and some even had family trees posted above them. A few farms posted signs noting that they retained the right to "50% of semen," to be extracted "at buyer's convenience and at seller's cost." It was a very different way to spend a Saturday, indeed.

When the actual auction began, it was very much like the events one sees on the tee-vee, where a man stands up and starts talking very quickly and very loudly. Bidders either raised their hands or nodded definitively and I tried to stand as still as possible, so as not to acidentally take home a $2,000 ram.

I'm sure I was being paranoid, however, because no one mistook me for a local. In fact, before the auction began, one of the organizers announced that I was visiting from the States and that I had been learning about wool farming. Little old ladies came up to me to discuss my job and to discuss New York while some of the older farmers offered me beers.

Also present were a woman and her daughter, raising money for melanoma research. The farmers agreed that 10% of each farm's top-selling stud would benefit the cause these two ladies represented. The daughter was planning to ride a horse across Australia in order to raise more money for research - a journey that was scheduled to take her approximately three months.

I don't think many people from the US get the chance to visit an event that's so far out of their element, so I was grateful for the experience. These farmers are hard-working, family-oriented men who dedicate their entire lives to their livelihood. They have a wonderfully welcome and tight-knit community and are trying the best they can to promote a product and industry they love. Even though I ruined a pair of shoes in the past few days, I feel very lucky to have experienced what I did.