Unless a solution can be found, farmers will no longer get centrally published information from store sales at Scottish auction marts. Currently, the Institute of Auctioneers and Appraisers in Scotland (IAAS) handles this data on behalf of its members.

However, following the Scottish Government’s funding being pulled for the data processing and reporting the information will stop from January 1, 2024. IAAS is now exploring alternative ways to fund processing and publishing the data before the deadline at the end of the year.

Neil Wilson, Executive Director at IAAS, said:

“Unfortunately, during 2023 Scottish Government has decided to stop collecting live market data from Scottish livestock markets and contractual changes with DEFRA have also resulted in Scottish data being unavailable on the AHDB website from 1st January 2024. Both positions are regrettable and IAAS would have preferred neither of these situations to have arisen.”

IAAS is now looking at ways to ensure relevant information can be delivered to farming customers across Scotland in a clear and accessible way, however, they do point out that there may be a lack of information in January due to the timescales of getting a system in place to deliver this information to farmers.

Neil added: “We will look to increase our work with stakeholders and industry to make sure we can get some level of information out to the sector as soon as we can.

“Unfortunately this is a challenging, costly, and time consuming process to work through as we need to develop new methods of providing this information.”

Meanwhile, in England, the Livestock Auctioneers’ Association is moving its data from the AHDB website to the new its own independent livestock market sales data platform from next year.

Chris Dodds, LAA executive secretary said: “We are grateful to AHDB for their assistance during the transition period, while we move to our new platform. Their continued invaluable and successful work of collating, processing, and sharing market data on our behalf has been appreciated by ourselves and the industry.”