The judge for Hapert 2012 is Janie Hicks 

Janie Hicks grew up during the 60’s on a million acre sheep station bordering on the Pilbara Desert region of Western Australia’s north-west where, for generations, her family had run up to 35,000 strong wool Merino sheep, producing over 1000 bales of wool annually.  Livestock, in terms of sheep, cattle and horses, was the currency of her daily life, and the local indigenous aboriginals were variously her friends, companions, and mentors.  The daily life and future fortunes of the family were governed by the inescapable realities of the wool market, and their ability to breed livestock which met the criteria of quality and quantity that would determine viability.  

Her education was undertaken mostly as a boarder at a private school in “nearby” Perth, just a 1600 km road or air trip from home.  Upon graduating from school, she spent a further year on a Rotary Exchange scholarship in the USA, attending Sioux Falls senior high school, graduating for a second time in 1978.   

Already an accomplished horse woman, now with a new taste for travel and adventure, she moved on to Switzerland, where she took employment training young horses and show jumpers.  In Europe, she discovered a flair for language and cooking, and gravitated into the hospitality industry, where she spent the next 20 years, initially in Europe, and subsequently back in Australia. 

In the meantime, her family had imported some of the first alpacas into Australia, and established the Coolaroo Alpaca Stud in April of 1987 on a property in the highlands, just south of Sydney.  The first few alpacas arrived from the USA in 1988, followed by a larger import in 1991, and in 1992 the family opened The Alpaca Centre in nearby Berrima, selling and promoting alpaca products to an enchanted and intrigued public.  With a growing awareness of the “processable harvest” of alpaca fleece, and with generational understanding of the same concept in Merino sheep, the family initiated some manufacturing trials in alpaca wool, and began to apply some of the same principles that they had learnt through the wool industry. 

Significantly, this led them to Dr Jim Watts, a vet, scientist, researcher, and adviser to the Merino industry, whom they appointed as a consultant to Coolaroo Alpaca Stud, thereby marking the first application of the SRS® (Soft Rolling Skin) breeding system, already so successful in the Merino industry, to the alpaca industry.  That development subsequently saw the establishment of SRSAI (SRS® Alpacas International), of which Janie was to become a foundation shareholder and director, and which now services over 100 Australian and NZ alpaca breeders, sharing a common interest in breeding soft-handling, long, dense and even alpaca fleeces that are silky smooth and highly processible.  That system is founded on a scientific understanding of skin biology and heritability, and the visual identification of fleece markers for length and density.
 

In 2001, Jane travelled with her husband and three children to Peru, where they lived for nearly a year.  The children attended local schools in Arequipa, while Jane travelled widely across the Puno conducting field work on alpacas and gathering data, which were later to become the basis of a work published with Jim Watts benchmarking follicle density and other traits in the native Peruvian alpaca herd.  The results were presented at the 2003 International Alpaca Fiesta in Arequipa.    

Today, Jane owns and manages the 700-strong Coolaroo Alpaca Stud, run according to principles developed over a lifetime of involvement with fleece-bearing animals, and refined by scientific research in husbandry and breeding.   These principles underpin her commitment to the development of the alpaca as a viable livestock alternative for serious commercial farmers, and reflect her confidence in achieving that goal for the benefit of all alpaca breeders.