Day two of Christmas calf sales at Naracoorte

Elders auctioneer Ronnie Dix said the calves looked outstanding after a tough season.

Transcript

00:00Here today we yarded about 2,450 steers, which the majority were black, and a vast majority of those being EU,

00:09from sort of two bigger, a fair chunk of being two bigger producers in the southeast,

00:15from L.S. Johnson & Son and W.B. James & Son Karunga.

00:19The offering here today, I said it right at the start of the day, we're pretty fortunate as a company that I feel that in the southeast

00:25we have some of the best bred cattle in Australia, and we certainly service some of those kinds in a day.

00:31Their cattle were on show here, and it's a true credit to them, because from the day these calves were born,

00:37for the first four or five months, they barely had a bloody blade of grass, and they ate all the hay we could give them,

00:42and it wasn't until sort of mid-September that we started to see a little bit of feed,

00:45and our country just turned inside out at the start of October, which is good to see.

00:49And gee, some of these calves, you wouldn't realise how tough we had it, because their weights really stack up

00:55to what they are in just a normal year in the southeast, which is always pretty good.

00:59A lot of these late February and March-April calves, the lead draft of them were just a tickle over 400 kilos,

01:05so very, very good.

01:07A lot of these steers, I reckon our yarding would have averaged close to 330, 5 or 40 kilos in those steers.

01:13The lead draft of these steers, for the 370 kilos through to 410, were 21 to 2200.

01:19We topped at 2300 for one pen and 444 kilo steers.

01:24We didn't have a lot of vendors for the heifers, and certainly not a lot of weight.

01:28A lot of the heifers sat around 280 to 320 kilos.

01:31Some of those bigger heifers that were 350 to 360 kilos, we had their parra here buying to put out for next year to put a book in.

01:39A lot of our heifers sat inside of $4.80, might have been 30 or 40 cents to the year than yesterday.

01:45We were pretty happy.

01:46We had some heifers over $6, and not many under $4.50 or $60.

01:50We had a Gippsland buyer here that probably bought two, maybe three loaves.

01:56And I reckon 90% of these cattle stayed local, which is really promising to have a strong sale,

02:01and to have them back in our own paddocks so we can supply them through the spring this year.