Dry forces thousands of cattle onto the Wagga Wagga market

About 8700 cattle will be sold at Wagga Wagga today while 6000 cattle are booked into Wodonga for Thursday, as the dry forces farmers to sell.

Tens of thousands of stock are hitting markets across south-eastern Australia as dry conditions encourage the sell-off of both sheep and cattle.

Wagga Wagga’s cattle sale on Monday has almost 8700 cattle booked to sell, while last week the same centre sold 77,000 sheep and lambs.

And further south at Wodonga, about 10,000 store cattle will be sold within a week as feed resources dwindle and rain fails to turn around the fortunes of the season.

Hamilton in the Western District will yard 2000 cattle on Thursday, while 3000 will be on offer at Mt Gambier in South Australia on Friday.

And next week Mortlake will yard 6000 cattle – again – at its store cattle sale.

The Northern Victorian Livestock Exchange at Wodonga is expecting about 6000 cattle to be yarded at this Thursday’s market.

Local producer Michael Gadd from Walwa has been one of those selling cattle recently to lighten numbers and said many were choosing to sell rather than feed their whole herd through a second tough winter in a row.

“I’ve never seen the number of trucks of hay coming in and the number of cattle trucks leaving the district,” Mr Gadd said.

“It’s the right decision to sell early for many but it does cut into cash flow both this year and next.”

In last week’s offering at Wodonga, 48 per cent of steers and heifers weighed 280kg or less, and a portion of that was under 200kg and included spring-drop weaners normally held for much longer.

Numbers are also starting to increase on AuctionsPlus which had its third highest weekly yarding last week ever.

The online platform offered 27,080 cattle last week, a number only surpassed in March 2020 when Covid 19 restrictions kicked in and there were 30,669 and 28,787 cattle offered.

Last week’s sale saw 5936 steers and 1506 heifers weighing under 280kg listed for sale.

A spokesman for AuctionsPlus said the offering was up 158 per cent week-on-week, but it needed to be understood this was partly due to short selling weeks around Eastern and Anzac day.

“The surge among the weaner and yearlings was driven by steers, up 203 per cent week-on-week, with heifers also lifting by 129 per cent,” the spokesman said.

“Most of the increase came from lighter to mid-weight lines, especially in the 200–280kg range, now making up over a quarter of this week’s total.”