Stud sheep breeding enthusiast Ben Butterick showed he had an eye for stock when he won the Central Otago Stud Merino Breeders' merino junior judging competition.
From a farming family on Banks Peninsula, Ben (19) has been working for the Calder family at Lauder Station for the past 18 months and ''loving it''.
The competition was held at Lauder Station on Friday and attracted six entrants, with Will Stuart second and Ben Nielsen-Vold third. The annual event is open to young people aged between 15 and 30 and the winner and second-place getter go to the Canterbury A&P Show in Christchurch in November to compete in the national final.
Ben Butterick and his father, Dave, are in partnership in a South Suffolk stud, while he and his grandmother Pat Butterick have a Hampshire stud.
Ben started stud breeding when he was 12 and enjoyed the opportunity to improve the genetics. He also enjoyed exhibiting at various A&P shows.
Shows were an opportunity to see how your sheep measured up against other breeders, catch up with breeders and also, ''hopefully'', win and promote your sheep, he said.
Central Otago was different country to Banks Peninsula but he was enjoying his time in the South and working with merinos.
''I like their wool. They are good to work with; they are relatively placid,'' he said.
Both Robbie Calder and his father, Grant, are accomplished dog trialists and while Ben admitted his own dogs were ''nothing special'', he was enjoying the opportunity to improve his dog skills and was keen to get some better dogs.
He competed in the junior judging competition in Christchurch last year but felt a little out of his depth at that stage - ''I'd never seen so much wool before on a sheep'' - so was hoping for better luck this year.
Being able to place the animals in the correct order and then explain the reasons for those placings was not daunting and it was good experience for later in life when public speaking was called for, he said.
Ben was passionate about sheep breeding and hoped to expand his studs, hopefully with an on-farm ram sale. From a farm at Ashburton, fellow competitor Tom Lowe (22) has been working at Mount St Bathans Station for the past seven months.
After leaving school, he spent several years at Telford, a division of Lincoln University, where he completed a diploma in rural agribusiness.
That was followed by shepherding stints in the Mackenzie Basin and then Otematata before he moved to Central Otago.
It had been a busy time on the station with the recent bad weather and while he quipped that he was fitter now than before he went snow-raking, time was being spent fixing fences after the flooding.
Mr Lowe hoped to work in Australia, on either a cattle ranch or a sheep station, before eventually returning to Mid Canterbury to farm in partnership with his father.
Brought up in the North Island, Ben Nielsen-Vold (25) moved south about nine years ago, working first at Mt Nicholas Station, on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, then the Matukituki Valley and then Tarras, where he works for Gordon Lucas on a finishing block.
He had a laid-back approach to judging, saying he ''got a bit of a run-down in the truck on the way here''.
''You can't let too much worry you or you'd end up bald quicker than I'm going already,'' he said.
The competition was judged by Allan Paterson and Ian Smith, both from the Maniototo and strong supporters of such events.
Having been around many shows and young people and sheep, Mr Paterson said young people were losing the ability to use their hands and eyes to understand and assess sheep.
While there were a lot of tools used now, with the likes of computer recording and EBVs, ''our eyes and hands are still there to be used''.
Hopefully, Young Farmers clubs were becoming stronger, because in the past, that was where people started their stock-judging careers and were taught the fundamentals.
He was impressed with the way the competitors placed the sheep. Most got them in the right order, which was ''a credit to them'' and it did not happen often.