This week saw the launch of the new Irish Farmers Journal online mart price calculator.

The calculator was developed over the last week in response to mart closures due to COVID-19. While marts have been authorised to facilitate the sale of cattle from Wednesday on, the challenge will be to inform farmers on cattle prices and trade direction.

The calculator has been developed in conjunction with a stock bull price calculator to aid farmers in purchasing stock bulls in spring 2020.

It has been a huge hit, with almost 4,000 farmers logging in to calculate the price of different classes of animals.

When the price of each animal valued on the calculator is added up, it comes to over €4m of cattle valuations in the last 24 hours.

The top breed searched on the calculator was Charolais, at 26%. This was followed by Limousin with 20% of the searches, Aberdeen Angus with 18% and Friesian with 12%.

400-500kg was the most popular weight category searched, accounting for 32% of searches.

Steers were the most popular type of animals searched, at 32% of searches. This was followed by heifers at 24% of searches and weanling bulls at 20%.

The calculator is powered by hundreds of thousands of livestock sales through marts using the Irish Farmers Journal MartBids app. It takes prices from the same five-week period in 2019 as the date accessed and also gives the latest prices available in 2020. Prices will update on a weekly basis to reflect the direction of the cattle trade.

The calculator can be accessed for free here.

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