Buying a bull... from the other side of the world
DURING my visit to Australia I was keen to have a read of the farming papers and magazines to see what the major issues were for our counterparts Down Under.
And while the floods and storms were dominating the headlines there were plenty of other stories which had a familiar ring to a visitor from Scotland.
Articles about low grain prices, problems with getting supermarkets to pass a fair share of prices on to their farmers and calls for shoppers to buy more locally produced food could all just as easily have been spied in farming magazines back home.
There were sale reports too – and animals were making cracking prices with everyone keen to restock in order to eat up all the extra grazing which was around with all the rain.
But the market sections served to remind me that I would be missing the big bull sales back home – and, having lost one of our bulls during the summer, we had some re-stocking of our own to do.
And so we spent a while in the Aussie sunshine downloading the sale catalogues over the internet and liaising with my son back home – who had been through to inspect the animals before the sale.
With the market streaming a live-cam view of the sale on the internet, I gathered the Australian contingent of the family round the laptop in the middle of the night to watch the sale on a decidedly iffy mobile connection.
Disappointingly we could only hear brief snatches of the auctioneer as he rhythmically ran through the bids for each animal as it took to the ring – and the actual footage wasn’t all that clear, with the bulls apparently jumping from one side of the ring to the other, like some poor quality stop-start animation.
We did, however, have the opportunity to try to spy our man on the ground in the crowd at the sales, hoping to see him doing the actual bidding for us.
Like a game of Where’s Wally? we tried in vain to pick him out on the low resolution pictures.
As might have been predicted though, just at the crucial moment, the internet connection broke down and, lest we disturbed him mid-bid, we had to wait until the sale was over before we phoned to see if he’d been successful.
Happily he had – and, while we might not have been there to see the whole thing, even on the other side of the world, we felt we’d had at least some involvement in buying our new bull.