Pedigree ram sales are well underway, where staggering sums can change hands, like the £231,000 that was paid for an 8-months-old Texel ram lamb in Lanark back in 2009, or the £160,000 for a similar-aged Blackface ram lamb sold in Dalmally three years ago.

Those two breeds have a different approach to how they sell rams. Terminal sires like Texels, Beltex or Suffolks, that breed meaty, cross-bred lambs, are often backed up with pedigree certificates and performance data, while hill breeds like Blackfaces, Cheviots and Swaledales, are not.

How anyone can spend the price of a house on a ram lamb with no genetic information beats me.

Buyers of hill breeds have to trust the vendor's word with regard to the sire and dam of the ram on offer, and decide on its potential breeding value by visual assessment.

Hill sheep farmers often seem more impressed by attributes such as a "bold" appearance, soft hair, a glint in the eye, or the "set of the lugs" of a ram. They have also been watching the 5-year-old draft ewes and ewe lambs that different hill flocks have been selling over the years, so they have a fair idea of the type of breeding stock each farm produces.

Many commercial breeders on the other hand now want performance recorded rams to produce cross-bred lambs for the meat trade. They believe it is vitally important to identify rams with superior genetic merit (breeding potential), as their genes are the only attribute that will pass from one generation to the next - hence the saying "a ram is half of the flock".

Trials have shown that high-index recorded rams can increase profitability by £3-£4 per lamb. Over a ram's lifetime, this is an extra £1,000 and the resulting genetic improvement to the national flock as a result of using Estimate Breeding Values (EBVs) is estimated to be worth £10.7m per annum to the British sheep sector.

EBVs provide a measure of the potential of an animal for a specific trait, and take into account performance data collected on known relatives.

The sort of things that are recorded are growth rates to 8 weeks and 21 weeks of age, the fat depth on the back measured at 21 weeks of age by an ultra-sound scan, as well as muscle yield, leanness and carcase shape using Computed Tomography (CT) imaging.

More recently, breeders have also been recording maternal traits to improve the breeding performance of females. Such parentage information could be useful to hill farmers when selecting rams and replacement ewe lambs, giving them extra data with which to make informed decisions. Electronic Identification (EID) is proving to be a big help in recording maternal traits, and some progressive hill farmers have started to gather and use such data.

While hill sheep farmers trust the verbal pedigrees given by the vendors of pure breeds of hill rams, the same can't always be said about those buying pedigree terminal sheep breeds, who are beginning to think about DNA-testing as an aid to proving pedigrees.

Although DNA-testing is an additional expense, it is probably the only practical way to determine parentage in a typical hill system. In the longer term it could be used to better record performance of individual animals, especially in sheep systems which use multiple sire mating groups, making them more efficient and better equipped to make breeding decisions.

The Auchertyre flock at SRUC's (Scotland's Rural College) Hill & Mountain Research Centre is trialling the technology. This high hill flock of around 400 Blackface ewes were split into four mating groups, three of which had multiple sires. All ewes and rams had tissue samples taken from their ears, as well as their lambs. Of the lamb samples taken, 98 percent were subsequently matched with a sire and a dam.

The Texel Sheep Society - a popular, white-faced, meaty breed that were originally imported from Holland - introduced DNA-testing of rams about 4 years ago to build up a data-base for animals conceived by Artificial Insemination (AI). The information is also currently being used for research into the meat-eating qualities of progeny as well as identifying those rams that are breeding mastitis-resistant (a disease of the udder) females.

The Beltex Sheep Society - an increasingly popular offshoot of the Texel that are also a white-faced terminal breed that were imported from Belgium in the late 1980s - introduced DNA-testing this year. Nasal swabs are submitted when rams are being registered, and the aim is to build up a database that can be used to provide parentage confirmation.