Elphin Mart had its annual spring show and sale of breeding heifers on Wednesday of last week, with almost 300 heifers moving through the ring.

Trade was hot, with a few heavy hitters from Northern Ireland in attendance.

The sale saw an almost 90% clearance rate, with a combination of the export trade and farmer buyers looking for replacement heifers seeing the trade up almost €300/head on the same sale in 2022.

Confidence is running high in the suckler sector at the moment, with weanling sales hitting record prices.

Cull cows have also been an exceptional trade in recent weeks and while €3,000 may seem like an awful lot of money for replacement heifers, when you are selling cull cows at €2,500, which many farmers have been in recent weeks, the €3,000 doesn’t seem that bad.

The best trade last Wednesday was for the muscley Belgian Blue, Charolais and Limousin heifers.

A number of in-calf operators were doing business both online and ringside, with a lot of the top heifers in the sale heading this route.

Top-priced heifer

The top-priced heifer made her way north at €5,500. The May 2021-born heifer weighed 589kg and was clapped out as the first-prizewinning heifer in the breeding heifer class.

Five heifers crossed the €5,000 barrier, with the majority of these heading north.

The new base price is €3/kg, with the majority of heifers crossing this and many of the top heifers selling for over €4/kg.

Good-quality red and black Limousin heifers in the 500kg to 600kg range were trading from €3.40/kg to €3.80/kg. Plainer heifers were back around the €3/kg mark.

Speaking to the Irish Farmers Journal, mart manager Kevin Caslin said: “We decided to split our annual spring heifer show and sale last year into a breeding sale and a general heifer sale and it worked out really well.

“We had buyers and sellers from all over the country last Wednesday, you couldn’t have the heifers good enough for some of the buyers but they are willing to go that extra mile for that real good heifer.

“We had really good online activity as well, with over 20% of the heifers being knocked down to online purchasers.

“We have a big sale of in-calf heifers on Monday night 20 February for local man Fred Dolan.

“We’re expecting good demand again, as they are genuine heifers, with some calved and some on the point of calving,” he said.