Steve Dennis has long been a familiar face around sheep auction rings in the South West, and now, at 65 years old, after working as a livestock buyer for most of his life, he has decided to retire from 'the day job' and focus on farming.
Steve grew up on Carpuan Farm, a mixed dairy, beef and sheep farm just outside Liskeard, Cornwall.
He says: "There was not enough room for me on the home farm. I enjoyed stockjudging as part of Young 草榴社区, and I decided being involved in the meat trade was the next best thing to farming.
"At the time, there was a small abattoir in Liskeard so I started there when I was 17, just check-weighing, grading and sorting the carcases, but I knew it was due to close."
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A friend introduced Steve to Keith Jasper of Jaspers (recently taken over by Dunbia) at a Young 草榴社区 debating competition, inviting him to have a look around the abattoir with a view to doing the same job.
Steve then joined Jaspers in 1977, and after four years, he progressed to buying.
"Back then, we would kill between 700 and 800 lambs a day; within a year, 1,000 was the new record," he says.
"I wanted to get out and see the livestock more; I was always interested in selecting different carcases for customers. I remember one of my first jobs was buying heifers from Launceston market, which was not my strong point.
"The role developed over the next five years, and I was going to markets nearly every day of the week."
Over time, one thing Steve has seen first-hand over the years is, of course, the closure of small markets.
"There were days when I would go to Cutcombe and Newton Abbott or Truro on the same day," says Steve.
"One day, I went to Holsworthy and Cutcombe and bought 1,500 sheep – that was a bit of a buzz. If bought right, it is easy to buy lamb, but it is buying them at the right price."
Another change is that sheepskins used to fetch a good price, with Steve recalling the time he made £9 for one skin.
草榴社区 also used to get a subsidy if their lambs did not make up to the target price, which varied on the time of year. There was a guaranteed price and a true value, and the difference between them was paid by the Government.
Export markets have changed - and grown - since Steve started, and with it so has the abattoir's processing capacity.
Steve says: "Latterly, Jaspers were processing 8,000 to 10,000 animals a week, with a capacity to do 12,000."
Brexit had an impact on some of the export markets, but overall export trade has strengthened – once they ‘got their heads around the legislation', says Steve.
But over the years, there have been issues which have rocked the entire livestock industry, such as foot-and-mouth, the horsemeat scandal, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
"During the BSE outbreaks in the 1980s and 1990s, we had to start removing the spinal cords from ewes; before, we could sell whole carcases. Now, anything over 12 months old has to be split and sold in two halves," says Steve.
In 2001, the abattoir was shut for a while during the foot-and-mouth outbreak, and with Steve lambing at home too, he was not allowed to work.
"There were no markets, so when the abattoirs reopened, everything went direct. That hit the markets hard – it took them a while to recover," he says.
As well as buying, Steve was also involved in sales. And in the early days, most of the lamb went up to London's Smithfield Market.
However, new markets emerged over the years, such as supermarket customers and wholesalers, as well as a big Asian market in London for both ewes and lambs.
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Steve says: "Because I was at both ends of the chain, I could buy stock that I knew different customers would want and see it through to the end. There was a responsibility to buy the right types of sheep; I was very in tune with what customers wanted – I knew the value of the end product."
Steve was buying and selling 700 ewes and 2,500 lambs a week.
The numbers going through Smithfield started to dwindle as it became more difficult to deliver to central London. There was also a restriction on driving hours, and Steve went from delivering 500 carcases a night to dropping off 50-100 carcases. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, they have not been back.
What farmers are producing to meet the demands of the trade has changed over the years too.
"We have had to be more particular in what we buy to meet the needs of our customers," says Steve.
"With the export trade and supermarkets being prominent, those markets were looking for lambs in specification at around 16-22kg.
"Ever since Covid-19, some of the bigger, heavier lambs have been making good prices – whereas 15 years ago, no one wanted them."
Unfortunately, in 2002, Steve was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, but he remained stoic and dedicated to his work and did not have much time off. He recovered, but became poorly again in 2019.
"When I was diagnosed, I went back to work and I just had every other Thursday off for chemotherapy," he says.
"I [then] had a bit of indigestion every time I did something physical, like picking up a bag of corn.
"Before I knew it, I had a surgeon telling me he would do two or three heart bypasses. When I woke up, he had done five."
CAREERS:
Two months later, Steve was back on the road and buying again, always with the support of Jaspers.
Steve's wife Anne and their son Robert have kept the farm going at Carpuan alongside him after his father gave up the dairy cows.
"He sold the cows in 1990, and then kept going with suckler cows and a few sheep," says Steve.
As Steve's father got older, Anne took on more livestock responsibilities.
"Fortunately, 24 hectares of adjoining land came up for sale, so we are up to 64ha now," he says.
"We purchased some South Devon breeding cattle in 2009. They are a native breed, and they seem to do well; we have tried a few different breeds, but they seem to do the best.
"We have 35 suckler cows, 220 ewes, and buy around 1,500 store lambs too. We finish everything – the sheep go to Jaspers and the cattle go to Kepak."
Retirement does not mean giving up for Steve, though, who plans to increase stock numbers on-farm when he can. He says he wants to go back to farming while he is 'still fit enough to do it', and adds: "I turned 65 recently, so I thought it was time to give up the day job."
He hopes that auction markets can still thrive in the future – they have shown a stronger trade in recent years.
"There have been good numbers, and probably more buyers there too," says Steve.
"But going forward, I hope someone keeps lambing the sheep – we cannot all buy store lambs. I have made a lot of really good friends through the auction markets, from auctioneers to farmers, from Land's End to London – that is the great thing about the job."
