Agriculture

Northern Schools Prime Lamb Competition 2026

After many months of planning as the host school, the Northern Schools Prime Lamb Competition went off on may 5th with an early start of an 8am weigh in. All up for our show this year we saw 125 lambs across 38 pens and 12 led lambs judged in 6 classes. ASC managed to get some success with all of our lambs with results coming in as follows:

Light weight pen 34 - 4th place

Medium weight pen 55 - 5th place

Medium weight pens 56 & 64 - Equal 6th 

Led lamb - 2nd place out of a class of 12 proudly shown by Tom Kitchener 

We also managed to see some success with our students. Overall 184 students attended the Northern schools Prime Lamb Comp with a strong 17 coming from ASC. We ended up with winners in the Stage 4 section with;

Oscar Ridgewell - Equal 3rd 

Tim Thompson - 4th 

Asher Ridgewell - Highly Commended 

Another stand out of our ASC students was our year 11 student Makayla Heagney. Makayla was asked whether she wanted to shadow our judge Mr Kevin White while he judged all 6 of the lamb classes that we had. Mr White praised Makayla for her enthusiasm and want for knowledge as she asked him many questions through the process. We would have been lost without Makayla and her responsibility as scribe for the day. 

We would like to thank our presenters, without you all the day would not have been possible; 

Peter McGilchrist - UNE Meat Science workshop (was definitely a student favourite!)

Ebony Noland - LLS eID tag workshop

Rachael White - Livestock Photography workshop

Bateson Pittman - Livestock handling workshop 

Grace Collins - Junior Judging 

As well as our thanks to everyone who was involved in the day from catering, sheep transport etc., you are all so greatly appreciated. 

We now anxiously await the results from the hook portion of the competition where our prime lambs are judged on their carcass quality.

We had some incredibly exciting news our hook results for our lamb comp.

Results are as follows;

Light weight pen 4th

Led lamb 4th

Medium weight pens 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Champion and Reserve Champion

And the icing on top of the cake is our Champion Medium weight pen went on to tie for Grand Champion Hook Pen!

We're absolutely delighted by these results and can't wait till next year's competition.

Many many thanks to Pete McGilchrist and his team from the UNE meat science team for judging our lambs and to the Andrew Jackson and his team over at Thomas Foods International for processing our lambs.

Sydney Royal Easter Show 

This year our ASC Livestock Team once again headed to Sydney for the annual Royal Easter Show. Our team consisted of eight student – Jack Clayton, Renee Murdock, Sophie O’Connell, Chloe Looker, Kya Doyle, Lola Gaw, Jasmine Brennan and Darcy Andrews.

We were at the Homebush Showground site for eight days including the Easter long weekend and competed with our Limousin cattle, Berkshire Pigs and a mixed variety of school grown pumpkins that were also used in our region’s major Central district display. Our students were involved in several junior competitions, learning seminars and lots of hard work as a team to well represent our great school, Armidale and the New England.

In the beef cattle section, we had huge success with being awarded the prestigious prize of Champion School Steer which was beautifully presented by Sophie O’Connell. This was an incredible result where we beat every other school and there were many. Our other lightweight steer was awarded the Reserve Champion open lightweight steer and our middleweight steer was placed third out of twenty-nine in the open section, another fantastic result.

Renee Murdock was placed third in her F002 school paraders competition. Well done, Renee.

In the pig section, we were awarded a second and a third place with our young gilt (ASC Hog Ranch Lass R20) and young boar (ASC Hog Ranch Caesar R17).

Renee Murdock was awarded the Champion Junior Pig Judge, Sophie O’Connell the Reserve Champion and Jack Clayton was placed fifth out of forty student finalists from around the state. This was a great achievement where all students had to give a speech on a microphone in front of hundreds of people. Well done team!

Apart from the wonderful success we had at this huge show, students had an absolute ball and will never forget this experience.

A big thank you to everyone involved who made this trip possible!

I’d like to make special mention of Jack Clayton in year 11 who has enthusiastically participated in all this year’s competitions so far. He has also been a hard-working team member who has contributed very well to the overall success of the ASC Livestock Team. Jack was chosen to represent the Northern Central Zone in the state finals at the Sydney Royal Show for Fruit and Vegetable judging and Merino fleece judging. He was a reserve for Merino sheep judging, Beef Cattle and Meat Sheep. In Sydney Jack was a finalist for the Fruit and Vegetable junior judging competition and was invited to give a speech to justify his placings. Jack also judged the superfine and medium Merino fleeces. He says he’s now working towards qualifying and improving his results in all the agricultural junior judging competitions at the Sydney Royal in 2027. Well done, Jack.

Preg checking ASC ewes with vet

Year 8 Technology & Year 9 Agriculture - Preg Checking Ewes 

Miss White's year 8 Technology and some of Miss White's year 9 Agriculture students got the opportunity to witness some agricultural technology being utilised on the school farm to help us with our flock management. We had our amazing vet Jo Hoad come over from Uralla to check for pregnancy in our 20 ewes using ultrasound. We went in hoping for a positive result and answers that could help us manage our ewes within the final months of their pregnancies to best accommodate the needs of them and their lambs - for example giving our triplet or quadruplet mums a bit more feed to keep them healthy, happy and ready to make enough milk to feed their small lamb army. 

The students had a fantastic time helping Jo in terms of "casting" the ewes onto their backs using our sheep race set up so that Jo could go in with a clear shot to put the ultrasound on their bellies. It was great seeing so many of our students wanting to be involved and witnessing their amazement in seeing what we could on the ultrasound screen, a favourite was definitely when they could see the lambs little feet kicking and heart beats ticking along. Of our 20 ewes, Jo was able to confirm 19 are in lamb and 1 we believe just alluded the ram this season. Whilst the lambs were a bit too big to accurately tell how many were on board we could estimate based off of size and development that most of our ewes were about 2.5 months along so about half way with many suspected twins (and possibly a set of triplets  )! 

Thanks again Jo for taking the time today to do this for us, we greatly value all the work you do for us here at the ASC School Farm.

The students can't wait to see these lambs on the outside in term 3! I think they're all counting down the days to some newborn lamb snuggles.