HERE we are, the middle of March.
It's a kind of hiatus between the cropping groupies beginning to rev up and the livestock aficionados trying to wring every cent out of a market that should traditionally be in their favour.
Depending on your choice of livestock there is a widening chasm between your reaction to how it is turning out for you.
Lamb producers and feeders are certainly frustrated by the lack of escalation in prices.
Agents and the occasional columnist have been touting 'imminent' price surges that have yet to come to fruition.
The outcome is still in favour of processors at this early stage, and it makes people wonder why prices are so derelict when the Australian dollar is at the 75 cent mark and at the same time 12 months ago the same dollar was at parity.
Cattle producers are reaping a rich reward, and rightly so too.
Sadly, there are few who can actually take advantage of prices that are really only taking income back to five or six years ago.
I often browse through my notebooks that document the 'Pat on the Back' quotes for the past eight or nine years, and it comes as a surprise that prices are only returning to a level that were commonplace half a decade ago.
Feeders are now a fact of life.
From the Upper North to the Upper South East, people are lotfeeding cattle.
It seems to be a fairly simple equation: how hard can it be to buy store condition young cattle and give them a limited area so they can't walk-off accumulated condition, and return them as an article sought-after by meat buyers at a premium price that results in a handsome profit?
Grain prices are a bit prohibitive to be feeding ordinary cattle. There can be nothing more galling than pouring money down a beast's throat and finding that the final result is a fair bit less than expectations.
Many cattle are dished up at various markets and their sale is predicated with the claim that they have been on grain for a period that doesn't even go close to reflecting their condition.
If you have a beast that hasn't done very well on grain, don't pretend that it is a product worth a better price than any other store-condition animal in the market.
Despite popular opinion, buyers are a little smarter than that.
The whole thing boils down to a very simple equation: all that a producer, feeder or even a processor can do is create a product for a market that wants their product.
As long as our domestic demand is well below our production levels, there is no doubt hat we are bound by the requirements of our customers.
