Lessons learnt from this year’s bull sale

ONCE again I had the opportunity to attend the annual bull sale for a well-known breeder in Matabeleland.
The sale as always was at the Trade Fair show grounds in Bulawayo. This is an event that any livestock farmer or practitioner looks forward to every year because besides providing one with a platform to buy high quality pedigree bulls and heifers, it also helps to re-energise many and remind them of two things. That it can be done and there is a good reward if you do it properly. This article again hopes to share a few lessons that were picked from the bull sale so as to help those that could not manage to attend this high profile livestock farming event.

The first and most critical lesson that needs to be learnt by farmers especially smallholder farmers and those that wish to get into livestock production is that it is a long process.

It is not for the fly by night chancers who think they can make a quick buck in two months and rush to buy their dream car.  The breeder has invested over 50 years into livestock breeding and we all know that real breeding is a meticulously painstaking process. This means it is now a transgenerational enterprise passed from one generation to another.

The lesson therefore is that in livestock production you have to be prepared to go the whole length and you have to be able to develop systems that you can be able to pass on to your kids for the sake of perpetuity of the enterprise.

There are no quick wins or quick riches in livestock production especially beef production so if you are looking to be an overnight millionaire and you are in livestock production, you definitely riding the wrong horse.

Another lesson which I picked from the bull sale was that quality sells and pays. It is not a secret that our economy is biting and biting hard. There simply is no money in the market and hence people have no buying power meaning selling items especially of high value is not easy.

I know this first hand because I have been trying to sell one of my cars since February this year and it’s not gone. The effect of the biting economy can be aptly demonstrated by a simple comparison that in last year’s bull sale the highest bull went for something around $5 100 while the lowest was somewhere around $3 300.

This year the highest was around $3 400 and the lowest around $2 100. This shows that people just do not have the money anymore because of economic challenges.

However tough as it is farmers could not resist quality both from the bulls and the heifers and they had to stretch their pockets because of the quality of the product on display. One farmer could not resist a parcel of pedigree beef master heifers and he parted with $1 500 for each heifer and the parcel had 10 heifers, please do the math! That was quality. A premium price for an equally premium product. The heifers were averaging around 350 kilogrammes in live weight which means they went for something around $4,3/kg.

Those that sometimes buy heifers of similar quality will know that heifers cost around $2,50/kg. So this was a good price by any definition and it was simply inspired by quality.

I can reveal here that no heifer went below $1 000, in fact the minimum was $1 200.
So the lesson is quality pays and I wish smallholder farmers could pick this one and stop producing things that look like cattle and hope to sell them for the price of cattle!

Another important and encouraging observation made was that there seems to be an increase in interest in young people to get into livestock production. I say this on the basis that the sale was well attended by youthful people and they could not have been there for picnic.

In fact, I met one of the young farmers at a beef school in Harare last week and here he was in the bull sale in Bulawayo.

This is a demonstration of the drive and zeal to excel in this field. Previously such events would only be attended by retirees and pensioners but this time I saw a lot of young people, some of them known to this writer who had come from as far as Plumtree.

The positive energy they exuded after the sale can only be described by one word, inspired!

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