Features, Trucks

Over the ditch: Dubbo Saleyards

Dubbo Saleyards

Dubbo Saleyards is at the heart of Australia’s livestock industry, handling over 1.3 million sheep and 200,000 cattle annually. With state-of-the-art facilities and a rich tradition, it's a model for efficiency and growth.

The livestock trucking industry is unfortunately like the overall trucking scene, having a pretty hard time of it recently with the restructuring of processing plants, lower livestock numbers, online farm auctions and the demise of many traditional livestock sale yards.

With dwindling sheep numbers many of the regional saleyards have closed or are just rotting away. The lucky ones are seeing more frequent yardings but the iconic scenes where many rural towns came together for sale days are a long distant memory.

In rural New Zealand, King Country, Ongarue in the heart of what was once traditional sheep country, is now the domain of pine trees and logging trucks. Sound familiar?

Dubbo Saleyards
Local farmer trucks and the big road trains and B-triples are mixed together to get the job done

The saleyards were a social event as much as a necessary business event. Few are left as the numbers dwindled and changes in the rural landscape have forever gone. The centrally located yards like Tuakau, Frankton and Fielding now have larger catchments and with weekly sales are trying to survive under land and residential development pressures.

In the South Island, dedicated yards like Canterbury Park and Temuka are out of town and are moving ahead as many are closing.

Across the ditch the opposite is happening, with many multi-million-dollar developments for purpose-built and rurally located ‘Livestock Exchange’ centres, as the Aussies call them.

Dubbo Saleyards
Traditional American brands dominate with Kenworth obviously the favourite among the owner-operators and large fleet operators alike

One of the biggest is regional council-owned Dubbo Saleyards, centrally located in mid-west New South Wales, around five hours west of Sydney, but in the heart of the cropping and livestock region of the state.

The huge Fletchers abattoir has its own stock route from the yards and with full road train access from the surrounding main roads, it is a quietly efficient model catering to the local, pigs, goats, sheep and cattle farmers in the production-rich area.

Dubbo is one of Australia’s busiest yards with weekly sheep sales (Mondays) usually having 40,000 head. Cattle sales are on Thursdays and average around 4000 head, it can sometimes be double that. Annually that’s an impressive 1.3 million sheep and over 200,000 head of cattle.

Dubbo Saleyards
The new saleyards are designed with larger MC units in mind

The huge yardings are well supported by buyers, restockers and processors from around the eastern states. The efficient unloading and loading areas are helped by on-site jackaroos, keeping the Aussie Outback traditions alive.

For a typical Monday sheep sale, stock is delivered the afternoon before, all night and all morning. Once sold, the stock is then trucked out all day and into the next day. Cattle is much the same, with large wet yards and paddocks able to hold 1000s of head until auction.

Dubbo is also a popular midway gathering point and every day of the week trucks of all sizes and types are busily coming and going.

Dubbo Saleyards
Volume loading is the key to efficiency: big, dedicated crates, 4.8m height limits, four-deck sheep fixed floors and tough running gear to survive the harsh outback environment

While New Zealand sheep numbers and associated trucking work is on the decline, the opposite appears to be the case in places such as New South Wales, with many similar new purpose-built Livestock Exchanges spread around like at Tamworth, Casino, Cooma, Carcoar, Forbes and Wagga Wagga to cater for their specific local regions.

The one thing that makes it all work is the local livestock trucking industry, who thrives on getting the livestock delivered in and out with great animal care and professionalism.

Being able to handle the yardings and the trucks that bring them means the new super yards are a footprint that New Zealand could follow in the future.

Images by Rod Simmonds

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