Good old Hoover

Extracted from the Farm Tender weekly Newsletter - Sign up and get the email every Wednesday morning before 6 am. www.farmtender.com.au

No matter what type of Farm you own or run, there is one thing that is stock standard, everyone has a Dog (or several), and 95 percent of the time, it's a working Dog.

However, the humble working Dog has been grossly underrated for years.

That's until Hoover came along. Who's Hoover? Hoover is a trained up working Kelpie that sold for $32,500 at the Casterton Working Dog Auction in June.

Hoover is the latest pin-up boy for the Working Dog industry, a well-established one for many years.

I reckon, though, we are just about to see Working Dog's get a whole lot more expensive, kinda like the humble Lamb Shank did all those years ago.

In this day and age of on-Farm labour shortages, a good dog has never been more valuable. Now, getting a good one is the hard bit. It's a bit like the racing game, finding the good ones is an inexact science.

So what's an unproven Working Dog worth? We sell them on the website for between $200 to $1000, and the more proven ones are north of $1000.

Is that cheap? What are they worth?

I think those prices are cheap, even if you have to try a handful to get a good one.

To get a good staff member to work on Farm can be around $100,000 a year (package), and new side by side Motorbikes start at $25,000. So for a Livestock Farmer, buying into a Working Dog or two is cheap in comparison.

Like Lamb shanks in the past, which the Dogs used to eat, the humble Working Dogs profile should take off.