DO you remember, when you were a kid at school, all the various crazes we used to go through?
Assorted cards, weird collectibles (admittedly, they came after me), certain games, the hula hoop – and then the yo-yo.
I loved the yo-yo craze.
I wasn’t a Coke drinker, but it was the Yanks who, as best I recall, brought the yo-yo sensation to country towns.
Everyone had a red yo-yo – although I immediately swapped when the orange Fanta version appeared on the scene.
However, what I loved most
about the yo-yo craze was the pros.
Truly, I kid you not.
The schools would even invite them along and we would all file into the assembly hall and these smooth-talking septic tanks would leap onto the stage, walking the dog, rocking the cradle and going around the world. Some had a yo-yo in each hand, others were doing the most amazing tricks.
They were urged on by the “oohs” and “aahs” from the spellbound students who, like me, were loving the opportunity to not be in a classroom and out of the reach of the teacher’s solid-wood yard ruler (that’s one metre for you youngsters). In my day it was something you ducked, or at worst fended off with a well-placed elbow, as the enraged teacher tried to pound you for back-chatting, ignoring, talking, nodding off or just being a general smartarse.
What I didn’t realise at the time was that the yo-yo would prove to be one of most valuable educational tools I encountered during my time in secondary – indeed primary – purgatory.
And if you are wondering why, you clearly did not become a farmer, and you just as clearly have not looked at all the crucial market indicators of late – especially ones such as the Eastern Young Cattle Indicator or MLA’s sheep sale reports.
Up, down, up, down, sideways, 180 degrees (occasionally 360), never a steady trajectory and, of late, never really rising.
Had a mate the other day sell steers and he got $1300 less – yes, less – than he did for similar lines not much more than 12 months ago.
And these weren’t any of the lighter-weight types being dumped faster than you can hang up on Bill, Steve and Sandy wanting to offer you a good deal over the phone. These were prime cattle, smack in the top percentile of the grid, and normally buyers would be beating each other off (where’s that yard ruler?) to get at them.
So let’s have a gander at the EYCI.
As I sit down at the old Imperial to tap out this missive, that particular benchmark sits at 429.73 cents a kilogram carcase weight.
Looking at my beautifully maintained business records (the missus does help a little there) I see at the same time last year, I was getting a smidgin over 1000c/kg.
Of course, my cattle would be expected to go sale high – after all, they’re mine. But even the scrubbers were around 900 cents.
So where does this all go wrong?
We’re still feeding the same number of people, exporting similar tonnages and we know the population continues to rise. So we will be feeding more.
The missus assures me meat prices don’t appear to be all over the shop (that’s a good one, eh?) like they are in the saleyards. They’re absolutely not dropping like a stone either, although our revenues are.
Sheep are even worse.
I know some blokes who cancelled their trip to the local saleyards because, for them, they are not so local, they just happen to be their closest. Which means transport costs.
The first time they bit the bullet and went, they might as well have put a bullet in each one and stayed home.
Even beautifully bred PTIC breeders are battling to go too deep in the $100 range. Hitting $200 would be unheard of in current times – unless you just happened to be Johnny on the spot when the yo-yo defied gravity and twanged back up, taking the EYCI with it.
In the meantime our season has just about pinched out and I’ve got mobs of underdone jumbucks with, in the politest of agent doublespeak, mostly store condition and underweight for the market.
But I have brought in new genetics recently and started splashing out on the good old long-term plan to jack up the genetic quality.
“Whacker, you old fool,” the missus scolded. “At your age a long-term plan is waking up tomorrow morning.”
So now who’s the yo-yo?
