Marts’ mystique suffers online

Cavanman's Diary

I still recall my first time ever attending the mart. I was 11 and managed to wrangle a day off school to accompany my late grandfather to Cavan one Friday.

We were there to sell weanlings which, to the uninitiated, are calves which have been weaned off their mother.

It was a whole new world to me, like a foreign country in ways. For one thing, the grown-ups were speaking a language I didn’t understand.

The auctioneer reminded me of one of those Deep South American preachers, talking in tongues. There was talk of “two punches” and “one sub lifted”, instructions to “stand on” or “don’t let her go for a fiver”.

This was a circus and the auctioneer, quite literally, was the ringmaster, who held the ability to engage the audience, to interact with them, whip them into a frenzy when he wanted – which was almost always – or to calm them down between the attractions.

When he began his chorus (“On the market!”), all eyes were on the ring. Instead of trapeze artists and fire-eaters, though, the objects of fascination here were cows and bulls of every shade and breed, it seemed to me as a wide-eyed kid.

Simmentals, Limousins, Friesians and other exotic-sounding names - it was fascinating but I do recall clearly being petrified to even look in the direction of the man at the pulpit in case I’d nod or raise an eyebrow and end up inadvertently putting a bid on a bullock.

The child’s savvy doesn’t miss much, though, as Tom MacIntyre once wrote. I could sense that there were men in the company who were adept at the art form that was judging cattle in the ring.

They were the stock men, leaning over the barriers with a keen eye, assessing what went before them as the incessant chatter over the microphone informed them that this particular animal was “a good breeder” or a “good young beast”.

As the animal circled the ring, they knew its good and bad points instantly. It was wonderful to witness; it was clear that these were, in their own way, master craftsmen. They could gauge by the way an animal walked, by its carriage, girth, hind quarters, how healthy it was, how likely it was to put on meat or to deliver good calves and, ultimately, how much profit it could make them.

I say ultimately as if that is the primary goal of this operation – it is, in theory at least, but back then, and even to this day to some extent, a sizeable minority of farmers subconsciously viewed their occupation as sort of a hereditary pastime which turned a meagre enough few pounds and which they really hadn’t the inclination to develop any further than the small operation that it was.

“An expensive hobby” was how one farmer once described it to me and his argument made sense.

Anyway, the sad demise of the mart in Cootehill recently got me thinking about my mart-going days again, the bustle of the place, the buzz as you tuned into the frequency of the chatter going on around you whether it was around the ring or in the canteen.

Last Friday, for some reason – one part nostalgia, two parts curiosity I suppose – I decided to log on to view one of the marts at which farmers now buy and sell remotely.

Cavan was on, as were Tullow, Skibbereen, Draperstown, Dowra (sheep), Keady and Clifden. The start times of some were staggered but it was possible to channel-hop between a few.

I immediately realised, though, that this was not the mart of which I have fond childhood memories. I found it altogether charmless, eerily quiet in the absence of the wizened cattle-men around the ring. There was a single camera angle which captured a lonely-looking drover, moving an animal around the ring as the auctioneer’s ubiquitous, almost Joycean riff echoed against the empty concrete.

The bids, placed remotely via tapping a button on your phone or laptop, were flying in but the whole process just left me feeling cold. Marketplaces, be they selling livestock, machinery, property or wagers on horses or dogs, have never been merely transactional arenas. There has always been more; the atmosphere, the ‘wink and elbow’ lingo, the haggling, the eventual settling on a bargain of some sorts. That’s where the soul of it is.

And without getting too carried away about the thing, in reality, I wondered how could the judges, as the good stockmen are affectionately known, properly gauge what animals they wanted to buy.

Could they really see online the qualities of the animal or, worse still, could they spot the deficiencies? Bearing in mind that many of these martgoers are of a certain vintage and possibly might not be all that tech savvy to begin with, immediately, I got the sense that this was not a satisfactory way to be doing business.

Later, by chance, I was talking to a friend on the phone who’s in this game and I made it my business to find out his thoughts.

“There’s pros and cons to the whole process,” he said.

“First of all, only for it, trade would be non-existent since the start of Covid-19. Like it or not, it looks set to be here to stay.”

It is still possible to view animals in the flesh but even that is not as straightforward as it was due to restrictions. How it works, he told me, is as follows.

“All cattle are dropped to the mart. The farmer or haulier don’t leave their vehicle and the mart staff take the animals off the trailer and pen them. When all animals are penned, the mart allocates 10 or 15-minute windows to potential buyers to view the cattle in the pens. When that’s over, it’s ‘everyone out’ and the sale commences online.”

He admitted that buying online is riskier.

“It’s very hard in my opinion to buy cattle just by seeing them for a couple of minutes in a pen full of stock,” he said.

Buying and selling stock must go on - no sales means no income - and the way marts, and farmers and dealers themselves have embraced remote technology has belied any perception which existed of a backward-looking industry, lacking in progressive practices.

There is some truth in that too but the current situation shows the level of adaptability which exists when needs must.

Then again, some farmers were exploring other ways of buying and selling prior to the advent of the pandemic. Some were using websites and apps such as DoneDeal in order to connect with others.

Finding a potential seller online, a farmer had the option of travelling to them and viewing the animals in the field, inspecting their behaviour and getting a handle on their quality. There was also less disease risk as they were not mixing with other herds as would be the case in a mart and, of course, the middle man – the mart – was excluded, meaning both buyer and seller saved on the usual flat fee, which could be the guts of €30 an animal.

Now, any farmer reading this who has found themselves cut in two by a freezing draught on a winter’s day may laugh at my describing the “magic” of the mart but there’s no doubt there is an allure there. I couldn’t call it glamour but it’s convivial, a coming together, a day out, like a football match, complete with the wisecracks and characters that go with that.

With online marts, that’s gone. Will it come back? It probably will but remote buying is here to stay, too. There is something to be said for buying from the comfort of your kitchen.

Part-time farmers no longer will have to take a day off their main job to attend a mart; it’s cost-efficient, and time-efficient, in that sense.

It’s the price of progress, I suppose, but isn’t it still sad, in a way, to see yet another of the institutions of rural Ireland changed irrevocably?

Main pic: A scene from Cavan mart in 1987. Pic: Ian McCabe/IMCphotos.ie