Mart Price Tracker

I say marts problem is firstly the amount of time it takes to get sales completed. If a lad is in the box he says yea or nay on the spot. Auctioneer has a chance to get them into a price he is happy with to complete the sale. A few weeks ago I had two out of three lots thrown up as seller was unhappy, I got to bring home 3 cattle instead of 10. I stopped bidding with 20 lots to go.

Finally lads that keep pushing cattle to the limit will be withdrawing up 50 + of there sales.

😂😂😂

No it's 8-9% of body weight. A litre of water weights a kg. Have a look inside a trailer sometime 8-10 miles down the road. The steam rising is something else. What size is the slurry tank on a cattle truck is it a cubic meter, that is a ton of liquid. There could be another 2-300lires of sh!t and p!SS on the floor. That is 90%+water.

Most lads do not understand the difference between fresh and mart weight. The factory difference between hot and cold weight of a carcasse is 2% and that is just steam.

As a matter using 28kg bag's how much weight did you put on it.

I’m preaching on here for a long time that lads should be weighing their stock regularly. The weight loss you’ve witnessed is about normal depending on the time frame from loading to sale.

And that weight loss is the reason lads think they’re making factory prices in the mart when they are not. If they were U grade stock I’d expect them to be killing about 55% of their fresh weight in your yard so a 650kg animal would kill about 360kgs. When that animal stands on the scales in the mart weighing 600kgs he will still kill the same 360kgs. So his kill out is now 60% of his mart weight.

That’s the figures the factory men buying heavy stock in the mart work off of but the farmer selling is still working off 55% so he’s missing out on 30kgs of meat and thinks he got a good deal when the reality is the factory man buying him is giving less than the factory value.

Not really. Very hard to get cattle to eat hay or straw when on grass this time if year. Even if you fed them 4-5kgs of nuts at best it would help retain its own weight in liquid so 10kgs total. But the ration will generally reduce there consumption of other feedstuff and that is if they retain it. You also get dehydration especially in the truck

There’s nothing really you can do, it’s just something you have to accept at a day in the mart.

I’ve seen lads pumping cattle full of meal before going to the mart and I smile when I see it. Talk about wasting money! Even if the animal was to retain every ounce the eat, which they won’t, it still wouldn’t pay. Most animals are selling from €2 - €2.50/kg at the minute. Meal is anything from €3 - €3.50/kg, you wouldn’t even get the price of the meal back again.

One trick I’ve seen dealers use at weanling sales in particular is to leave the weanlings with no water since maybe the night before. When they get to the mart then they’ll turn them over to a pen with a drinker and the animal will fill itself with water so they get paid for the water. Obviously I haven’t seen them being weighed before and after drinking so I don’t know if it works but it’s something some of them do.