It’s dairy bull sale season and PGG Wrightson’s Taranaki livestock manager/auctioneer, Andrew Gibson is “in the thick of it”.

Shadow Downs of Waverley had a Hereford Yearling and 2-year-old sale yesterday and Taranaki’s Mangaotea Blackwell Family is holding its 27th annual bull sale today, Gibson told The Country’s Jamie Mackay.

A hectic schedule doesn’t always result in top prices though.

“The prices are back slightly from last year, as expected, there’s not too much surplus money around,” Gibson said.

However, farmers will always need stock so he wasn’t too worried.

“It’s an important part of the operation - guys are still snapping them up.”

In-milk cows are also on offer which is very early in the production season.

Gibson said this was the best time as it was between the end of calving and the start of mating.

This gave farmers the opportunity to work according to their own schedules.

“If people do buy them they can mate them to the date that they need them to be mated to - rather than buy them to the other farmer’s dates.”

Many farmers had gone into winter “under numbers” so demand was still up - although supply wasn’t in Taranaki, Gibson said.

“There’s a lot of enquiries at the moment but there’s not a huge amount on the market.”

Meanwhile, for beef, things were looking “really good”.

“The Stratford sale yards are really strong - we had the Taranaki cattle fair early this month and we had buyers from all around the country, which is really great to see.”

He reckoned a lack of numbers and larger cattle being hard to find had had an effect.

“I think we’ll see a bit of a jump in the schedule shortly and within the next month, those bigger cattle are going to be worth some pretty good money.”

As for sheep, sales had dropped drastically in Taranaki, Gibson said.

“We don’t do a lot of them to be fair. The Stratford sale yards and probably a lot of sale yards around the country used to be full of them.

“Our numbers have really declined - there’s just a few hardy bunch left there.”