Top Throughput Assessor (Cattle) - AuctionsPlus Awards 2024

22 August 2024

An article by AuctionsPlus

Katie Lewis from Corcoran Parker, Wodonga, Victoria, has been awarded the AuctionsPlus Top Throughput Assessor for cattle for 2024.

The award is dedicated to the assessor who has assessed the greatest number of cattle listed on AuctionsPlus in the past financial year. The recipient has also demonstrated a high level of assessment quality and upholds the AuctionsPlus User Agreement; including when both selling and purchasing.

Ms Lewis has extended above and beyond these values while listing more than 6,000 head of cattle on the platform in the past year.

Her throughput exceeded 6,000 head in the past year. Astonishingly in that time she processed listed close to 300 lots, which is more than double the next closest assessor in volume. She not only put through big numbers, she did so in smaller lots, which takes dedication and skill.

Ms Lewis' mentor Trevor Parker clearly made an impression on her during her early training, and would be rightly proud of her achievement.

To this day, she still lives by his advice that: “Right is right. Wrong is wrong. Half right, is still wrong.”

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I feel very proud to be this year’s AuctionsPlus Top Throughput Assessor for Cattle. It’s been a tough 12 months in the livestock industry, and to receive the throughput award backed by clearance rate is very humbling.

Trevor Parker was a great mentor of mine and he always said, “anyone can sell stock when the market’s up, the real agents shine when the market sees a drop.”

I think he would be very proud of me.

Honesty, continue building your reputation and no surprises. I like to imagine myself as both the vendor and the buyer, and stick to a “no surprises” policy.

I try to produce very thorough and detailed assessments, and always think, would I be happy with the way these cattle were described if I’d purchased them?

There’s been some real opportunity out there recently, from both a selling and buying perspective. People have been able to cull out older stock in a buoyant cow market and make some real herd improvements. This has been very exciting and opportune.

However, there’s nothing like making that phone call when a sale has exceeded initial expectations.

It’s a both a huge privilege and responsibility to be entrusted with the sale of what is some people’s entire livelihood – a privilege I don’t take lightly.

It’s an incredible feeling when you’ve done the marketing, targeted the right audience for the cattle and got the result.

Make a clear business strategy. You know your stock and you know your operation better than anyone. Choose your target and stick to it!

It’s always better to do an ‘A’ grade job of one assignment, than a ‘B’, ‘C’ or ‘D’ grade job of three or four.

I don’t know if I could throw a blanket over the entire industry right now. For us, here in North East Victoria, it’s just getting a Spring. Whilst in Far North Queensland, it’s been the live export ban.

We pushed through last year’s supply bottleneck and processors are now back on track.

I think the industry is always going to be under fire from one angle or another - that’s the nature of the beast.

However, I don’t know if there’s an office on Wall Street that could take a stock market crash like we did and just get back up and dust themselves off. Farmers are a resilient breed, a credit to themselves, and we will live to fight another day!

Well, as you expect from farmers, there’s not a lot of questions that we don’t get asked!

But with so much information available now at the push of a button, our clients can access market information and reports with great ease.

We also try to keep our social media pages updated with weekly market reports.

This makes discussing options very easy for both store cattle and finished bodies, and our clients are always asking questions about where the best place to market their cattle is.

That’s easy. “Right is right. Wrong is wrong. Half right, is still wrong.” - Trevor Parker

AuctionsPlus has been an invaluable marketing platform for us, especially over this very hard Autumn/Winter we’ve experienced.

While in North East Victoria, we haven’t been able to get our crops out of the ground, the north and parts of the west have had the one of the best starts to the year on record.

The ability to list cattle on AuctionsPlus where you are open to a national audience and target the buying power where it lay, has really kept an honest floor in the market.

I’d like to extend my deepest appreciation to all our clients who have entrusted me over the years with marketing their livestock.

We are blessed in North East Victoria and the Southern Riverina to be surrounded by some of the highest quality cattle in Australia.

The commitment that our local farmers devote to improving their livestock through genetics and management has really been the bottom line to marketing them, and I’d like to thank all of our clients for making my job that much easier.