The Sunday News
LAST week I followed the 53rd annual breed sale which was held at Mt Hampden in Harare. I was able to follow this premier livestock sale online.
It was my first time to attend an online livestock auction and I was impressed by the use of this technology to reach far and wide audience especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. The visuals and audios were very clear I felt like I was just by the auctioneer’s ring! As usual the premier sale is always rich with lessons to distil for the entire beef production industry.
The first lesson for me was to see the age old adage of “adapt or perish” being respected. The auctioneers for this event have been in this business for several decades and it will not be amiss for one to conclude that they have survived this long by being able to change with times.
Their ability to hold such a successful livestream of an auction is in itself abundant testimony of the ability to embrace changing times. The auction once again proved to be the ultimate livestock selling event with auction records being broken.
The two highest selling Brahman bulls went for something around US$42 300 on auction rate! Again, as expected there were furious bids around Brahman bulls reinforcing the dominance of the breed in Zimbabwe’s beef industry.
Some breeds even failed to attract a bid not for want of quality but for lack of knowledge about the breed. Like I have stated before, the de facto monopoly of the Brahman breed which threatens to turn the country into a homogenous breed is not healthy for the country in the long run.
Breed societies of these other breeds need to vigorously promote their breeds so that for starters we have enough entries of their breeds in such events.
At the moment we have the Brahman breed taking up over 70 percent of the entries at the auction. Another pertinent question around the breed sale is whether a single annual breed sale is enough as an outlet for the breeders?
Is this economically viable for a breeder to just wait for one sale throughout the year? I know that other breeders hold their own breed sales with one breeder.
It is my feeling that maybe we need three annual breed sales, one in Matabeleland, another in Midlands and the other one in Mashonaland. This means breeders and buyers will have three opportunities to either buy or sell at place where top quality is guaranteed.
My other view as a lesson from this premier sale, is that the beef industry needs similar platforms for commercial heads. Currently the national breed sale is for stud breeders only, with commercial farmers coming in only as customers.
It is my humble opinion that there are a lot of livestock farmers with commercial heads which are of very good quality and are sufficient for a whole range of farmers but they have no competitive outlets for their products.
Should we not have competitive breeding sales for commercial heads not necessarily pedigree animals? While stud breeders or pedigree farmers are obviously the cream of livestock farmers, it is important to acknowledge that there is a whole continuum of farmers with commercial herds at various levels of production quality.
These also need to be afforded lucrative platforms for selling. Commercial herds producers cannot be relegated to mere customers of stud breeders, they also need to sell at some premier event.
Many livestock farmers with commercial herds sell their breeding animals at sub optimal values because they are rated at the same scale as slaughter animals because of the outlets at which they sell. Imagine selling your nice looking heifers at Mhutshaphansi sale pen in Nkayi or at Matshokotsha in Lupane, these are bought for a song yet if there was a breeding sale for commercial herds where such heifers could be taken and sold as breeding stock and not lumped together with slaughter stock, they could fetch better prices.
As it stands farmers with commercial herds only sell direct to other farmers or via social media platforms yet they could have their own premier selling event which is well organised and advertised with every farmer and buyer in the commercial category looking forward to it. Who said premier auction sales should be for stud breeders only? The same can be done for commercial herds and this should be a challenge for livestock auctioneers.
There is a whole herd which is not pedigree which also needs an auction outlet in the mould of the annual breed sale. Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
Mhlupheki Dube is a livestock specialist and farmer. He writes in his own capacity. Feedback [email protected]/ cell 0772851275
