Baltinglass mart’s final sheep sale of the year finished on a positive note, with prices holding firm for most types and a slight increase seen for heavier butcher type lambs ahead of the pause in trade over the Christmas season to see lambs top out at €150/head.
Commenting on trade, mart manager Joe Kinsella stated “We probably had a smaller number of cast ewes to last week.
Store ewes were making anywhere between €55 and €95/head, while heavier ewes would have been trading at €125-€130/head.
It was a good selling trade, with quite a few store lambs bought online. Approximately 18-20% of our sheep are now sold online, with part time farmers coming in and viewing in the morning before going off to their full-time jobs.’’
Heavy lambs with a good covering of flesh proved the most popular on the day, with lambs in the 45-50kg weight bracket selling between €2.87-€3.15/kg or between €83-€99/head along with their weight.
Sample prices included lambs weighing 46kg selling for €136/head (€2.96/kg) and lambs weighing 53kg selling for €150/head (€2.83/kg).
Store lambs
Forward store lambs between 40kg and 45kg sold for a similar price per kg to the finished lambs, with good quality stores trading in the €2.70-€3/kg bracket freely. Lighter stores below 40kg were slightly back on their heavier comrades, with prices of €2.60-€2.70 more common, with some standout lots of ewe lambs with breeding potential of suitable for the Easter trade as hoggets climbing to €3/kg.
Joe Kinsella noted “we’ve seen a lot of lambs coming through here in the past few months that are behind on fat cover owing to the extremely wet weather, lambs are anywhere between 2-3kg behind what they should be weighing with the frames that are on them’’.
