There is nothing new about livestock market auctioneers feeling under pressure. There has been intense commercial pressure for a number of years from rising costs and movements towards direct selling and away from systems of farming that involve trading in store animals.

This combined with an overall decline in the livestock sector of UK agriculture has brought about a process of rationalisation involving a decline in the number of livestock markets.

This has been so marked in the South and East of England as to leave those parts of the country almost devoid of markets.  Successive major disease outbreaks, and the measures taken to control them, have provided a sharp impetus to the pressure for rationalisation. Markets were closed for much of 2001 during the foot and mouth outbreak.

Throughputs were still only slowly recovering and have now taken a further knock with the 2007 outbreaks of foot and mouth and blue tongue. This is bound to hasten the ongoing process of rationalisation and makes this review of prospects both very timely and pertinent.