Quotes largely unchanged as agents ‘buy out’ beef

With Good Friday taking place this week and Easter Monday being a bank holiday, I had one farmer express the opinion that as factories have been forced to put up their prices due to numbers beginning to drop, the “last thing sellers wanted was a break in play”.

With numbers further reduced to 33,614 for the week ending March 17, factory agents last week were seen to “buy out” all the beef they could at the country’s marts in the hope of holding prices to their direct suppliers.

It’s a strategy that appears to have worked as the majority of quotes yesterday remained largely unchanged.

The general run of quotes for bullocks ranges from €5.10-5.15/ kg with heifers on €5.15-5.20/ kg, with the top of the market for selected sellers around 5c/kg above this.

Although mart-buying helped to reduce the pressure on factories, some of the prices given by agents would mean their purchases on the bullock and heifer side would have to equate to factory prices of €5.70-6.00/kg.

The mart-bought cull cow is the one that is the factories’ major target though.

While quotes for O grade culls range from €4.40/kg for continentals back to €4.20-4.30/kg for fleshed Friesians, with better P grades selling from €4.10-4.15/ kg, mart-bought O grade culls are reported to be going through the system at prices of €4.50-4.60/kg.

Quotes for young bulls have eased slightly with information yesterday indicating that U grades under 24 months had eased back by around 5c/kg to €5.35/kg with base prices for bulls under 16 months ranging from €5.15-5.20/kg, although €5.25/kg has been reported for full loads.

Finishers in recent days said the atrocious weather may force their hand to sell. Faced with mounting meal bills and dwindling silage supplies there does come a point, after months of feeding, that mentally you just want to “get rid” of your shed cattle.

Yes, in the back of your mind you know this will give you funds to pay your meal supplier and other bills but fundamentally you want the farming year to just move on.

Get the stores out, watch them race and buck before they eventually settle.

But that’s the thing — field conditions are brutal, meaning that your stores are still in the shed and are drawing feed away from your heavier stock and adding cost.

ICSA’s beef chairman John Cleary wants to see market data on the state of the beef industry across both the EU and Britain, as collected and published by Bord Bia, kept as up to date as possible.

“Last Wednesday [March 20] several sellers told me that factories they had contacted, while not offering less money, did claim that the trade in the UK had become more difficult,” he said.

“I immediately went onto the Bord Bia website to see what data was available in relation to prices in the UK and Europe and was very disappointed to see that various charts and graphs that track Irish beef prices against those from the UK and the EU appeared very out of date.

“In the case of R3 steers, the data shown came from the week of March 2. The chart for the various composite prices verses benchmark prices was for the week of February 24, while the graph on offal was a year out of date.

“Without up-to-date information, Irish beef producers are completely at the mercy of what the factories claim is the market situation.”