WHILST Malton Show was enjoying its most successful day since moving to Scampston Park, I was stuck in a caravan at the Chatsworth Beef 2000 event launching the new "Farmers & Auctioneers Network" onto an unsuspecting public.

As the use of the Internet gallops ever onwards at its own frenetic pace, agriculture desperately needs to have some umbrella organisation which will allow us to find anything to do with our industry on the web without having to spend hours searching for it.

The potential of such a dream has been spotted by quite a few entrepreneurs with an eye for the illusive golden opportunity; and amongst the latest is the Miller Freeman press empire which publishes the Farmers Guardian and which has launched its Farmgate system. The auctioneers as a group have been courted by these burgeoning super powers to see if we will act for them as fieldmen in promoting their cause to our farmer clients.

After a lot of soul searching, the auctioneers in England and Wales have decided to remain independent and build their own system which has been christened farmstock.net - the farmers and auctioneers network.

I suppose the idea was sparked off by the ever-increasing deluge of regulation and paperwork that is being heaped upon us and that, in theory at least, communication across the internet should be able to help ease the burden. I have just listed a few bullet points that will give you a flavour of why and how farmstock.net will operate:

Initially we have concentrated upon cattle because this is the species which has suffered most in over-regulation.

All the Government bodies have paper-based systems for application even though, like BCMS, they have computer systems which are under used and which, incredibly, do not interface with each other. For example, the computer at Workington running the Cattle Movement Service cannot talk to the MAFF computer at Tollerworth, never mind the Regional Service Centres.

Perhaps, inevitably, the whole bureaucratic machine will grind to a halt, as was indicated in May when 4,500 frustrated farmers actually abandoned their telephone calls to BCMS because they were unanswered!

We have got to find a better way of communicating than paper and the Royal Mail.

Conversely, the consumer is wanting more information about the meat he or she is buying and the supermarkets are demanding this be available to them.

BCMS cannot even cope with the relatively simple tasks of registration and movement, never mind introducing data on Farm Assurance and feed for onward transmission to the abattoirs. We need to build a system that will enable abattoirs to get all this added value information on line.

The auctioneers will build such a system to be up and operating by the end of this year but its success will depend entirely upon the volume of stock put onto it by the farmers. If a meaningful mass of cattle is put onto farmstock.net, then the rest of the industry will have to take note and the farmers will have established an independent system which will be controlled by their own local auctioneers and not by the superpowers beyond.

Our goal is to get every bovine animal in the UK registered on farmstock.net and to do this we are offering all the various farm management packages the opportunity to interface directly and automatically with our system.

At Beef 2000 it was gratifying that some of the major farm management software houses came to the stand and want to work with us. If a farmer hasn't got a management package and doesn't want to buy one then he can use his local auctioneer quite happily to input the information onto farmstock.net and still reap the benefits.

Once having captured the data it can then be electronically transmitted for all sorts of purposes including passport applications, movements and added value information required by the abattoirs.

The reaction of officialdom has so far been very encouraging, with the head of the BCMS spending more than an hour with us on Thursday and his second-in-command travelling to York next week. In addition, the chief finance man at MAFF took an equal interest in us, amazingly hinting that there may be funds available to help.

I suppose the crunch will come with the major abattoirs but it was a great relief that Beef 2000 gave us the opportunity to meet many of the key players who in turn watched closely the farmstock.net demonstration and, to a man, gave us both their blessing and helpful advice. Like the rest of us they are drowning in paper and anything that will enable them to download traceability information at the touch of a button is good news.

I think I have gone on long enough to, hopefully, whet appetites that farmstock.net does have a future. Provided all the auctioneers back the system there will be an umbrella website which will give farmers access to all our auction sales including machinery, farm stock, quota, antiques and even property.

There is no doubt that the internet is being used - we started with an old website at York for our machinery sales and in the week before the June sale we had 13,000 hits which included a gentleman from Saudi Arabia who flew in, bought 10 John Deere balers and flew out again.

I will keep you posted and, hopefully, we shall start having some road shows before long.

l l

The markets on Monday and Tuesday were akin to the old curate's egg. The parts that were good, or at least improved, were in the bull and pig sections.

David Lindley had just short of 200 pigs which averaged 77p/kilo up to a top of 79.5p achieved by Jack Horsley.

Amongst the bulls, I had 106 to sell and the atmosphere, thankfully, was very different from last week with Continentals making around 95p/kilo and the best running over 100p. Alice Thompson topped the bulls at 114p/kilo and John Wilson had the best heavyweight at 107p. Black & white bulls were saleable provided they had flesh and there wasn't much under 80p in the day.

There were almost 140 clean cattle and, even without Uncle Walter, the overall cattle average was 95p including all creatures great and small. Intervention-type steers were over 100p/kilo and the best from John Jacklin made 109p/kilo. Top priced steer of the day came from Jeff Marson at 112p.

Amongst the retail butcher heifers it was Alice Thompson who scored again at 122p/kilo followed by Bill Jackson with a heavyweight at 117p/kilo. The cattle trade certainly is encouraging.

Sheep were the one disappointment, with 812 in the market and trade slipping to just over 80p/kilo. The best priced lambs from Ron Green made 93p/kilo and we can only hope that the lamb trade doesn't drop any further.