DEAR EDITOR

It is not that the price of cattle this spring has jumped, it has pole-vaulted. Nobody saw it coming.

After a very long life in drystock farming, in my wildest dreams I could never imagine what cattle are making today. Long may it last. We suffered long enough but sweet are the uses of adversity.

Going home from the mart in Thurles recently, my mind wandered back to times past when cattle were extremely expensive one year and very cheap the following year.

The spring of 1957 was very good but the spring of 1958 was very bad and nobody saw it coming. In 1968 we had foot-and -mouth, nobody saw it coming. In 1973 you could hardly buy cattle; in 1974 you could hardly sell one — nobody saw it coming. Mad cow disease arrived in 1996, nobody saw it coming. In 2001, foot-and -mouth struck — nobody saw it coming.

Right now all the indicators for the cattle trade are positive but history has a habit of repeating itself. The only certainty in the cattle trade is uncertainty.

This bit of advice was given last October and as stores were dear then, if you were doing your sums, it would be very hard to see light at the end of the tunnel but now they have to be bought and farmers can’t even see the tunnel.

Of course due to the decimation of our suckler herd by the powers that be, good continental stores are scarce and farmers are forced to buy much plainer dairy type stock. The price of store cattle today is scary but, who knows, perhaps €8/kg for beef will be the new normal.

These are just the meanderings of an old man who was told long ago that there were always three ways of going broke — slow horses, fast women and feeding cattle for the winter! Happy Easter.