On August 28th, 2020, a lamb named Double Diamond was introduced for bidding during a Scottish auction at the Scottish National Texel sale in Lanark, Scotland.
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During the auction, they opened up bidding on Double Diamond at £10,500. A competitive bidding war proceeded between farmers and eventually, several farmers banned together to get a new world record for purchasing a sheep: £365,000! That’s equivalent to $486,805.98. The previous record before this was £231,000 for a sheep named Deveronvale Perfection, sold at the Lanark market, in August 2009. The sheep was only eight months old.
Double Diamond is genetically designed as an embryo-bred lamb.
“An ‘embryo bred’ lamb is a lamb which is the result of embryo transfer (a form of IVF) in livestock in which the female animal is artificially inseminated and then embryos collected from her six days later and implanted in to surrogate mothers,” explained a representative of the Texel Sheep Society to The Independent.
Texel’s sheep from Texel Island in the Netherlands is the breed local farmers prefer when it comes to selecting a sheep to purchase because they provide the best quality of meat. What makes Double Diamond so valuable is in addition to being a Texel sheep, his genetic source is maximized as a perfect embryo-bred lamb.
“It is done to maximize the genetic process within a flock by maximizing the number of progeny from the best animals,” The Texel Sheep Society told The Independent.
Double Diamond was acquired in a three-way partnership between Alan Blackwood from Auldhouseburn, Maybole from Procters Farm in Lancashire, and Messrs Teward from New View Farm in Darlington, according to Dailymail.UK.