I’m a dealer, and I come from generations of dealers. I learned my trade from my father, and I’m busy teaching it to my daughter.

I know! A girl tangler would have meant someone with hair that needed a good brushing back in my younger days, but that’s progress, I suppose. By the way, if you have a barnet that needs untangling, highlights, or a mullet styled, the son has a hair salon in town.

Anyway, I digress. Livestock dealing is less a trade, and more a craft. There’s artistry involved, finesse, psychology. And no one understands farmers, and the changing nature of farming through the last 75 years more than someone like myself. Always watching, appraising, stalking our prey. Striking like a cobra when there’s a moment of weakness.

Changed landscape

Back in the 1950s or 1960s one thing a dealer would always carry with him when calling to a farmer was a bag of sweets.

There would always be children around, hanging on to the hands of grandads or granduncles.

Families were “steps of stairs” and many children didn’t start school until they were five or six, old enough to walk as much as five miles each way, sometimes still on dirt roads.

Money wasn’t as plentiful back then, and sweets were a weekly treat, rather than a daily expectation.

A bag of clove rocks or toffees for the kids could literally sweeten the disposition of the farmer, who would happily take a couple himself while I was checking the cattle or sheep out.

And, often, there was a boy/man, strong as an ox, finished with schooling, home to work, but as young as 13. There was many a deal sealed by throwing these poor craythurs a bag of bullseyes.

While sweets are no longer a treat, and most people thankfully don’t smoke (a packet of Woodbines or Navy Cut were always in the top pocket of any self-respecting cattle dealer back in the day), one thing hasn’t changed. A dealer must bring a bit of news with him into a farmer’s yard.

It may be true that farmers spend half the day on their phones now, mic’ed up with fancy earpieces walking around like Bono on stage gossiping with their friends. It’s hardly surprising they do. Farmers are almost always on their own when I land. It’s either hit the phone or talk to the cattle.

Even so, a dealer needs to have an edge, so every mart sale, I’ll know who got the best price, and who had to bring their skinny calves home. I’ll know if the Department has been out inspecting locally, and I’ll have a blow-by-blow account of every land sale and rental that goes under an auctioneer’s hammer.

And that’s why I’m able to fill a column in the Irish Farmers Journal every week, like my father before me and his father before that, full of gossip and insider information.

That’s my secret. You’ll have to pay for any more. Happy new year and here’s to the next 75 years.