After highlighting last week about the low numbers of stores coming forward for sale compared with the same week last year, store bullocks and heifers have come out of the woodwork and were presented at sales this week.

Just over 2,000 lighter store bullocks weighing from 400kg to 500kg passed through the MartbBids system this week, with a further 1,399 heifers of the same weight also being presented for sale.

Moving up the weights, forward store from 500kg to 600kg totalled 1,784 head, with their female counterparts coming to 811 head.

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Probably one of the more surprising figures is when we look at the number of 600kg-plus bullocks and heifers coming in through mart rings compared with the national kill for last week.

Between Wednesday morning of last week and Tuesday evening of this week, 1,455 bullocks crossed the scales at over 600kg in MartBids marts, with a total of 33 marts using the system for video or catalogue only in the Republic of Ireland.

In comparison, the cumulative bullock kill for last week (31 August to 4 September) showed 14,630 bullocks slaughtered.

With circa 80 livestock marts in Ireland and 40% of them using MartBids, we can assume a rough average of 40% of cattle passing through our rings on weekly basis.

On back-of-the-matchbox sums, that means only 3,637 fat bullocks went through a mart ring last week, meaning 10,000-odd went direct from farm to slaughter.

It’s a similar case with heifers, with just 533 heifers weighing 600kg-plus and 1,062 cows passing though MartBids marts, despite a kill figure of 9,525 and 6,740 respectively

Yes, a good percentage of these were from feedlots run by factories themselves or closely linked to factories. They will maintain that this is needed for supply and to a certain extent they are right.

We have lost approximately 10% of our market share in Britain to the likes of New Zealand and Australia. The one benefit that we hold over these countries is our distance between ourselves and UK outlets, in that should a short-term demand come in (for example, good weather seeing a spike in burger demand for barbecues), then we can fill it, provided we have beef to hand.

Seasonality

The seasonality of our system means that we have larger volumes of cattle killed out of the shed or at the end of the summer off grass.

The tricky period is that May to August time, when supplies can dwindle. Not having the beef to hand means losing these contracts.

Saying that, there’s no better way of keeping a factory agent honest than presenting cattle to a mart and allowing them to vie against one another.

Castlerea Mart celebrated 50 years of trading last week with a special mass in one of the rings (broadcast through MartBids), with many other marts in operation for similar terms.

Prior to marts, we had fairs and cattle dealers, which was a much less open market.

For smaller finishers in particular, there is likely no other option, while the definition of a smaller finisher seems to creep up by circa 10 head extra per year.