YARDS OF WORK
IS it time for a radical overhaul of the Dalrymple Saleyards owned by the Charters Towers Regional Council?
Stock and station agents say it is something that should have started decades ago, but with the saleyards now the second biggest in the state behind Roma, it is woefully inadequate in capacity when it comes to servicing the region.
Charters Towers has 137 selling pens compared with 750 at Dalby and 450 at Roma. Dalby in 2014 received a $14m government grant for an upgrade. Even Gracemere, the selling centre for the beef capital of Rockhampton, sits well below Charters Towers when it comes to numbers.
So why is Charters Towers so far behind the eight ball?
Agents say it’s because successive councils have not kept up. As one agent said: “If the council at the time in 1979 when livestock scales were introduced had started the practice of adding 10 new pens a year, the yards would look a lot different to what they do today.”
It is common practice now in many centres to have selling pens fully covered. So inadequate are the yards now that agents, after selling the prime cattle, have to then empty the pens and bring in the store cattle. It wastes time and it frustrates the hell out of buyers who, in many cases, have travelled hundreds of kilometres to attend the sale.
It’s got to the stage where instead of having one sale a week, there has to be two in order to accommodate the cattle.
Once again this is frustrating for buyers who either have to hang around for a couple of days for the second sale or bite the bullet and leave and go to a sale elsewhere.
As one agent pointed out, northern Queensland is now the pre-eminent beef cattle production area in Australia. Evidence of this is the recent sale of Miranda Downs, north of Normanton, for $150m.
There is enormous demand for live export cattle. Two years ago Townsville overtook Darwin as the nation’s leading live export port centre.
Improvements in animal husbandry, genetics and station management techniques mean that cattle numbers in the North continue to grow.
One agent said it would be simple to expand the yards on the western side.
“Tear down the double decker loading ramp and build more yards out that side,” he said.
The Charters Towers Regional Council is not blind to the inadequacies of the saleyard.
Mayor Frank Beveridge told me this week that it was time to play ”catch-up”.
“We are master planning with a consultancy group now and we realise that the expansion of pens is something that needs to be done quickly,” Cr Beveridge said.
He said the challenge was to look forward to what demand would be in 10 to 20 years’ time.
“This is so that the changes we make complement what is happening well down the track in the future,” he said.
He said the feeling was there needed to be 100 more pens, which would bring the total up to 237 or thereabouts. This is still way below the number of yards at
Roma and Dalby.
Agents and beef cattle producers would no doubt like to know that the consultancy group for the saleyard upgrade include a trucking industry representative, a stock and station agent, a saleyards contractor representative as well as the council’s CEO, council’s saleyard director, Deputy Mayor and Mayor.
In other news, council is expected to announce the name of a new saleyard contractor in the coming days.