SOUTH Yorkshire’s Tom Hill and Ruby Wright, of Mill Farm, Doncaster, who have regularly been among the high price achievers with their Continental-x lambs at Skipton Auction Mart of late, stepped up a gear to land their first-ever monthly prime lamb championship at Monday’s July show.

They took the title with a pen of five 40kg Beltex-x picked out by Lincolnshire show judge Steve Dorey, who regularly travels up from Norton Disney to participate in the store sheep market at Skipton.

He is also due to judge the Butchers Lambs show classes at the Great Yorkshire Show in Harrogate next Thursday.

The Hill & Wright farming partnership run a flock of around 1,000 breeding ewes, predominantly Texel x, along with a 65-strong Simmental pedigree cattle herd. Their champion pen sold for £148 per head, or £3.70 top price per kilo, to Knavesmire Butchers in York, another pen among a 55-strong consignment from the same home doing better at joint top gross of £155, or 322p/kg for 48kg Texels purchased by Kendalls Farm Butchers in Harrogate and Pateley Bridge.

The reserve championship fell to the second prize Continental pen, 44kg Texel-x from JA Gibson & Sons, of Church Fenton, claimed for £143 each by Hartshead Meats in Mossley. The Gibsons sold additional pens at £147 (49kg 300p) to Robertshaws Farm Shop in Thornton, and £146 (43kg 339p), again to Knavesmire Butchers.

The third prize 48kg pen from Stokesley’s Richard Wood sold for £134 to Halifax wholesalers J&E Medcalf, who also went to £144 to claim the first prize pen of 51kg Suffolks from Michael and James Spensley in Elslack. The second and third prize pens, both weighing 45kg, from Colin Kippax, of Briercliffe, sold for £113 and £107 to, respectively, wholesalers Much Meats and Farmers Fresh.

John Nutter, of Hurst Green, presented hisregular run of heavy butchers’ lambs and had the other joint top price at £155 selling to Kendalls Farm Butchers, and £154 on two other occasions to both Knavesmire Butchers and John Kearns Butchers in Shipley.

Adrian Leach, of Hebden Bridge, made second top per kilo of 361p, or £148, with 41kg Texel-x-Beltex going to Vivers Scotlamb in Annan. Several other pens sold in the £140s, while smarter bred lambs were a better trade, a larger number achieving 300p/kg or more.

In fact, there was a better quality entry of sheep all round - 3,244 head in total, the 2,133 Spring lambs among them a sharper trade on the week, with the overall selling average up £4 per head at £108.52, or 256.3p/kg. The 73 prime hoggs averaged £86.72, or 186.6p/kg.

There was no let up in trade for 1,000-plus cast sheep, especially three-quarters and full meat ewes, well-bred types with size making £130-plus, with first-cross ewes £120-£135. Trade topped at £181.50 for Texels from Hurries Farm in Otterburn. Cull ewes averaged £82.51 and cast rams £115.94.

In the dairy cattle arena, 24 in-calf heifers at the fortnightly sale attracted a good crowd of bidders, with four successful buyers.

Top price was for one of ten from Richard Starkey and the Flasby Estates team, this heifer coming up two-years-old and selling to Pete Dakin, of Bolton-by-Bowland, with the consignment, all in-calf to Jersey, averaging £1,322.

A run of 14 in-calf heifers to the named Aberdeen-Angus sire, ABS Expresso, from J Crowther and Son, of Harden, topped at £1,380 and averaged £1,168, with volume buyers on the day being Evolution Farming in Dewsbury, who secured 18 of the heifers.

The weekly sale of 22 dairy-bred rearing calves produced solid averages of £393 for Continental bulls, £385.50 for Continental heifers, £285 for native heifers and £282 for native bulls.

Limousin bull calves under 40 days bred from Friesian cows sold well for West End’s Stephen Marshall, one topping at £470, a similarly bred heifer at an identical age making £385.

From the same home a sire-identified Aberdeen-Angus heifer calf hit £285.

Angus bulls, this time bred from Holstein cows, topped at £295 for Paul and Janet Bolland in Airton.

Winterburn-based Mark Smith’s British Blue bull calves were well reared at six-weeks-old and sold to £465, with a similar aged Blue heifer calf at £370.

Of the black and whites put through the Skipton sales ring, 19-23 day old Holstein bull calves were generally reaching £80-£170, a 31 day old Holstein from Andrew and Kathryn Lee in Lothersdale doing best at £190.