It was a scant week for cattle auctions in Manitoba as only three of the eight went ahead with sales.
For the week of June 2-8, only Grunthal, Ste. Rose and Winnipeg held auctions, with a total of 1,335 feeder and slaughter cattle sold.
“It’s that time of year when most guys kick [their cattle] out to grass. That’s it, no more trading until they run out of grass,” said Scott Anderson, of Winnipeg Livestock Sales.
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Winnipeg will continue weekly sales through most of June, shutting down on June 30 for Canada Day. Then it will host two sales each in July and August, “with kind of a break at the end of July and the beginning of August,” said Anderson.
For Winnipeg’s June 2 auction, new price highs were reached for some cattle, he said.
“The butcher cows crept up another $3 [per hundredweight]. The bulls were probably up $1 to $3. For the feeder cattle, it’s getting to that time of year when there isn’t a whole lot of big groups left. Just about everybody is sold out or going to be sold out,” he said, noting the Manitoba market is well positioned for the fall run.
The most notable price change at Winnipeg’s June 2 auction was a $12.50/cwt. bump to the high side of 800- to 900-lb. feeder heifers. That pushed up from $240/cwt. on May 26 to $252.50. The other increase of note was a $10 gain to the high for 500- to 600-lb. feeder steers, from $370/cwt. up to $380.
Otherwise, prices between the two sale dates were nearly the same.
On the downside, with fewer cattle coming to auction, quality has been marginal at best. For Winnipeg’s June 9 auction, Anderson said they were expecting about 170 cows and 120 to 150 feeders. The week before, 200 feeders and 230 slaughter cattle were sold.
Another issue is long-standing: transportation. With smaller cattle numbers, it’s more difficult to put loads together and some trucking firms tend to take part of the summer off, Anderson said. However, there are still truckers quite willing to haul “whatever you can give them.”
Heading into the week of June 9-15, several of the province’s cattle auctions will be back in business. Killarney was closed June 5 and will have its final sale June 12 before taking the summer off. Ashern scheduled June 14 for its last sale ahead of summer.
Gladstone will be open June 13 for its bi-weekly auction and Grunthal continues with its weekly sales the same day.
In a rare move, Heartland Livestock Services closed its Brandon and Virden facilities on the same week but will resume operations June 13 in Brandon and June 14 in Virden.
Ste. Rose ended its spring run on June 8 and will resume auctions sometime during the first half of August.
