Victoria boasts nation’s newest yards at Wodonga

THE Northern Victoria Livestock Exchange will open near Wodonga today.

New Wodonga Saleyards

THE Northern Victoria Livestock Exchange will open near Wodonga today but there are still some who maintain it should never have been built.

Most are celebrating the fact North East Victoria now has the newest and possibly best yards in Australia at Barnawartha, about 20km south of Wodonga.

And while the $20 million saleyards have all the bells and whistles — from removable soft flooring and plenty of light to the latest stock handling equipment — the controversy over the move to the new site still bubbles under the surface.

Wodonga’s saleyards were built at Bandiana about 7km away in 1979 and became one of the top five cattle selling centres in Australia.

But the first murmurings in 2008 that Wodonga City Council was thinking of selling or shifting the yards brought a wave of opposition, with protest meetings drawing hundreds of people, fighting funds established and 7000 signatures on a petition asking for the yards to stay.

READ MORE:End of an era at Wodonga

The council maintained the Bandiana yards needed a $6 million upgrade to meet new environmental and safety requirements, and that it was better to just build from scratch at a different site.

In the end, the protests were to no avail. A private company, Regional Infastructure, started and completed the new yards last year.

The Barnawartha yards will be the third trading venue for well-known Tallangatta cattleman Lang Peterkin.

He remembers the old yards in the centre of Wodonga, and can’t recall any angst when new yards were built at Bandiana in the late 1970s.

Mr Peterkin has been to a swag of saleyards in his decades in the cattle industry and maintains the Bandiana yards were, and still are, the best he has seen for their ability to handle big numbers of cattle easily.

Bids in: Auctioneer, Trent Boers with Ray White, Schubert Boers, at the last sale in the old yards.

“These yards were so good that the design went out across Australia with other centres building the same design,” he said.

He was at the final prime sale at the old Wodonga yards yesterday and will be checking out how the new yards work tomorrow.

Agents say there’s sure to be a few teething problems, but most are determined to make the new yards work.

Albury Wodonga Stock Agents Association president Trevor Parker was philosophical about the move.

“Life goes on and what’s the point of revisiting it all because the decision was made and the new yards are built,” he said.

“These new yards will work because we will make them work.”

Mr Parker said he did not oppose the move at the time because he felt the decision would stick regardless of what protests were made.

And he acknowledged that despite the angst surrounding the decision to close the Bandiana yards, most agents and producers were now ready to get on with the job.

“Undoubtedly these new undercover yards with soft flooring will be better for the people working in the saleyards and for the cattle, and that’s a good thing,” he said.

Northern Victoria Livestock Exchange manager James Thompson will be watching carefully as the first cattle are sold in the new yards today.

“Certainly Regional Infastructure has learned things from building yards at Carcoar (near Orange) and at Tamworth and the things they have learned have been incorporated into our yards here,” he said.

There are 216 selling pens and 80 dual-purpose pens at the new saleyards, which, combined offer more selling space than Bandiana’s 240 pens.

But the Bandiana yards had the capacity to hold more stock, with agents saying they could squeeze up to 7000 cattle in if needed.

End of an era at Wodonga

They say that the new yards will struggle to do that with even the 4500 due to be offered today.

And it will be hard to gauge the industry’s acceptance of the new yards purely by throughput, Mr Thompson said.

In the past financial year, 228,000 cattle were sold through Bandiana, but season and decreasing herd size will influence how many are sold through the new yards, he said.

There are 4500 cattle booked in for the independent agents’ store sale tomorrow, with prime sales starting at the centre the following week.