LIVE STOCK DEALERS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 August 1940, Page 9

LIVE STOCK DEALERS

DIFFICULTY IN ANTICIPATING VALUES.

An article of general interest to the farming community and others appears in this month's issue of ‘’Meat and Wool,” regarding live stock dealers. It reads: —Some breeders of live stock regard the dealer with aversion; others see in him a recognised evil, with an occasional good point to his credit others again look on him as playing a useful part in the stud stock industry. The following article signed D.J.G.. and presumably from the pen of its genial editor appeared in a recent issue of “Country Life": I wonder how many live stock dealers who remained in the business for years and years, have made money out of it. If you are an old stock man. you reckon up to yourself the dealers you knew who permanently succeeded, and the men who fell by the wayside—or the marketside. You can probably mention numbers of successful men in the pastoral industry today who got their first good start in dealing, but—how many of them remained dealers, which is another story. Forty years ago my dad, who was a dealer a lot of the time, told me that of all the regular dealers he knew, he could hardly think of one who died a rich man —he knew numbers who went broke. Yet they knew live stock. The trouble is that the man who can constantly anticipate live stock values is one in a hundred thousand — or is it one in a million. I mentioned the matter to Mr Cunninghamc Henderson. who has been "in cattle" for sixty years. The reply of this fine old cattle man was illuminating: "When I was a youngster in the Goulburn district,” Mr Henderson said, “a shrewd stock man advised me never to be a dealer in live stock. My mother, who was an exceedingly capable business woman, and reared twelve sons for the land, gave me the same advice. I have never been a dealer in live stock. I told a man over thirty years ago that if he gave me £20,000 on condition that I spent it constantly on live stock dealing and returned him the capital without interest at the end of twenty years. T would not touch the money. It has always seemed too much of a gamble to me. Yet. I have handled hundreds of thousands of cattle, and I think I know cattle." This is no condemnation of the dealer. Personally. I think he renders a real service to the industry, and I want to see him continue in operation. It is my opinion that often he makes three sales of stock where there would be only one or none before. This article is written neither in attack or in defence of the live stock dealer. It is simply recorded as a phase of our great industry. Being the son of my father, I sympathise a lot with the dealer!