I CANNOT even begin to guess when I first started to read the Stock Journal. I can vaguely remember pouring over the photos of people I knew who featured in the markets section when I was a child.
Even now I treasure the old photo albums passed down from my grandmother. Featured amongst the family snaps are grainy images of my grandfather, resplendent in collar and tie, Sunday best hat and bib and brace overalls at Gepps Cross selling lambs.
My grandmother had quite a collection of these cuttings from the Stock and Station Journal and the now defunct Chronicle. These images may have prompted my interest in the world of livestock and the habit of religiously reading the rural publications when the milk truck delivered the prized article every Friday.
These musings into the past were prompted by the discovery that in spite of my long history of reading the Stock Journal, I had obviously missed something interesting.
Among all of the very valuable market reports, so diligently accumulated and informative, someone had snuck in a section with the slaughtering figures in SA for the week and the yearly cumulative totals.
There, nestled between the representative cattle lines and the South Australian Livestock Exchange, the calf report was a little gem of information that in the next 12 months will be the barometer of where cattle and lamb prices go.
The progressive totals quoted have accumulated since early July 2014 and they shed a bit of light on the meat processing industry in SA - 9933 cattle were slaughtered during the week ending on January 16.
That seems to be a fairly average week if you work out the average across the previous six months, and it poses the question: where do all the cattle come?
Our regional selling centres account for some but if you break it down there must be a lot of cattle going on-the-hooks. Mount Gambier and Naracoorte saleyards have been yarding about 3000 a week, Mount Compass has been yarding in the vicinity of 1500 and Millicent and Dublin average about 500.
Let us say the auction system is making available an estimated 8500 cattle a week. Of the cattle that go to auction, there would be 25 per cent that are purchased by feeders and restockers and at a rough guess, at least 50pc of the remaining numbers are bought by processors for slaughter in various meatworks in Vic.
That leaves about 3000 cattle to be slaughtered in SA out of the auction system - a shortfall of 7000.
Lamb figures are similarly skewed. Weekly lamb yardings at the major sales centres are struggling to reach a grand total of 20,000 at this time of year, and a similar formula would apply to cattle.
Store lambs and interstate slaughter account for a fair percentage so the number of lambs bought for slaughter in SA saleyards could be as small as 7500 a week, yet the slaughter figures show that 85,000 lambs went under the knife.
Demand for meat is more than solid, supply is inevitably going to tighten and processors are still going to want to slaughter 10,000 cattle and 85,000 lambs a week.
