Listen: 'More information needed on mart boards on animals at UK cattle sales'

Scott Donaldson is group director of livestock at H&H group in Carlisle, one of the UK's leading mart groups and has 40 years of experience on the rostrum selling cattle across numerous marts in England and Scotland.

The lead-in to his presentation explained how pedigree beef breeders invest considerable time and resources into recording performance data for the cattle that they produce.

This gives bull buyers the information they require to make informed decisions when purchasing their next stock bull.

He questioned the information that is available to the store cattle buyer when they are investing huge sums of money to fill sheds and he posed the question: “Do they need more data to make informed decisions at the ringside?”

Donaldson outlined how pedigree sales have moved from a bull sale catalogue containing very basic pedigree information to BLUP figures to now EBVs, which contain a myriad of figures on an animal’s performance and predicted performance.

Bringing everything together

"Auction marts bring everything together - buyers, sellers, agents, families. This is why marts are the best place. The value in the ring is set fast. We need to make sure the right information is visible for the buyer.

“Buyers are choosing cattle quickly and haven’t time to process a lot of information. Specialist feeders purchase cattle, not on pedigree, but rather on weights and performance attributes and what they can do for them.”

He added that this isn’t about doing away with the visual appraisal, type, locomotion and general bloom are also important in making decisions on purchasing, but having extra data will help that decision making.

“We need a communication upgrade, not a reinventing of the wheel,” Donaldson said.

“If it can’t be understood in 10 seconds, it won't reliably change the bidding behaviour,” he added.

Donaldson outlined an example of what he though might work as part of this changeover to more data being displayed on boards including a predicted grade.

It’s a simple upgrading of what we display for purchasers

“Data is already there, it’s a simple upgrading of what we display for purchasers,” Donaldson said.

His thoughts are that once buyers use it and sellers see this being used, this will bring about the change. Completing the data circle means farmers have the data that they can use to make informed decisions.

Kicking back on some of the factory and supermarket sentiment at the top table panel discussion, Donaldson said: “Out-of-spec isn’t out of fashion. We need to remember that we have a lot of different customers for different types of cattle.”

There was a general consensus at the top table that the current UK grading system isn’t working for what today’s consumer wants and that eating quality needs to be part of that payment model in the future.