Times they are a changing!
10th September 2025
It’s the end of an era as NSA Wales & Border Ram Sales Executive Director, Jane Smith, bows out after 32 years in her full time role.
A sea of marquees at the Royal Welsh Showground is a sight Jane Smith will never forget. She was arriving for her first day running the NSA Wales & Border Main Sale back in September 1993. It involved sorting, penning and overseeing the sale of 9,000 top quality tups. Then of course there were the buyers and vendors to organize! And even for someone with Jane’s consummate organizational skills, knowledge of livestock and experience in international motor racing logistics, it was a challenge.
Jane, now Executive Director, recalls: “It’s still very, very clear in my mind. I drove around that roundabout and I absolutely saw the enormity of it. I thought, Oh my Gosh, what have you done here! “There were marquees everywhere, about 22 plus the administration tent. There were men running about with hurdles and I just thought, I have no idea what I’m doing here. I didn’t know that much about sheep and I certainly didn’t know anything about auctions. “I had a good grounding in logistics and organizing things, but this was a whole gamechanger. When I saw those marquees I wondered how I was going to get through it. But we did get through it and the second year was almost worse, because I knew what to expect!”
Since then there have been highs and lows. Foot and Mouth in 2021 and the Covid years, including her own serious bout of Covid in the run up to the 2022 sale posed serious challenges. The highlight has to have been the Princess Royal’s visit in 2018 to celebrate the sale’s 40th anniversary. Her Royal Highness presented Jane with a framed photograph of her with her favourite horse, Zeb. The memory is very special, especially as Princess Anne took a keen interest in the horse and Jane’s involvement with riding.
Many years spent on the motor racing circuit with her late husband, Robin, had given her the organizational experience. It also meant she is well able to think on her feet and recognise trouble and trouble makers well before there is a crisis. Stamina, good planning and a methodical mind are vital to the smooth running of the event. But while it was very physically demanding thirty and more years ago, she feels it is ‘much more difficult’ these days. And she says: “I couldn’t have done then what I do now what I did 32 years ago. I wouldn’t have had the experience.
“It’s very, very different now. People expect so much more. They expect a much higher standard of presentation and penning. Peoples’ expectations of a sale venue have changed dramatically over the years and we now aim to deliver a sale where rams worth many thousands of pounds can be shown off properly to prospective purchasers. In the old days if we had a wet sale we would be propping up the roofs of the tents and trying to divert water away from the sheep! And it’s with this in mind that as Jane prepares for, if not retirement, then a slower pace of life she is training her successor. Helen Fairclough-Watling will take over much of the responsibility next year, with Jane in the background during the transition.
It is giving Jane time to reflect. She can take pride in the transformation of the sale as it has moved with the times and faced down the many challenges. The UK ewe flock is so much smaller, online and private sales proliferate and it’s an altogether fiercer market place. Then there is the paperwork, the regulations, the bureaucracy and invariably a lost ram and/or a disgruntled sheep farmer.
The sale has, under Jane’s shrewd guidance, remained financially viable. And late at night after the main sale each year, she takes comfort in the fact that with a £2million plus turnover, the NSA Wales & Border Ram Sales is a serious economic driver in Mid Wales. It has also served to improve the Welsh sheep flock by bringing top quality rams from across the UK to the doorstep. And Wales is well and truly on the international map in terms of trading top quality tups.
It’s also a great place to catch up with old friends and make new. It is that Jane savours as much as
