Price of prime sheep and cattle poised to slip as festive feasting comes to an end

Pig farmers get a welcome boost from selling more hams, while hard-pressed dairy farmers benefit from the increased demand for cream and cheese. Then there are all the extra vegetables needed as people cook those extra-special dinners.

For about a month in the run-up to Christmas, with all the various parties, followed by Hogmanay and Ne'er Day feasting, food sales soar. That's mostly good news for British farmers, although sadly in this age of global trading, too much of the festive groceries are needlessly imported from half-way around the world.

All too soon the feasting comes to an end in the New Year as revellers resolve to go on a diet and lose some of the extra pound they have put on. Worse is the "credit card effect" that kicks in when folk get the bill for all their reckless spending. Suddenly the nation becomes prudent again and the price of prime cattle and sheep slip.

One of the features of Christmas is not that people eat more total meat volume (the volume of meat purchased varies little through November to February), but that there is a change in the mix of what the consumer buys. In recent years there has been growth in sales of lamb leg roasts at Christmas and interest in beef roasting joints also increases.

Lamb sales are particularly prone to seasonality with the peak period being Easter, when household purchases are up to one third above the average for the whole year, while the Christmas peak is nearer 15 per cent. These peaks are almost entirely due to increased sales of roasting joints, which account for half of all lamb purchases in these periods, especially legs which represent two thirds of the total roasting joints market. Purchases of roasting joints over the Christmas period are around 50 per cent more than the average for the year, and up to 70 per cent more over Easter.

While the British eat more lamb at Easter and Christmas, it's also a favourite in Portugal, Romania, Italy and Spain at those times of the year, which helps to push up demand across Europe. Those peak periods of demand matter to sheep farmers because overall sheep-meat sales in the UK have fallen by a third in 10 years according to a report by AHDB Beef & Lamb.

Halal lamb and mutton sales are becoming increasingly important to the UK sheep market as the country's Muslim population rises. Muslims now account for more than 20 per cent of UK sheep-meat consumption (24 per cent of lamb and 16 per cent of mutton) despite making up just 4.6 per cent of the population.

While the UK population has increased three per cent since 2011, conservative estimates indicate the Muslim population has risen 5.6 per cent in the same period to more than three million, helping to slow the decline in sheep-meat sales. Muslims are big consumers of poultry and sheep-meat.

It is estimated that Muslims in Europe now account for about 30 per cent of all sheep-meat eaten in the EU.

As with Christians, Muslim religious festivals can lead to peaks in demand for sheep-meat. For instance the festival of Eid-Ul-Adha, that took place in September, is a festival of sacrifice-making after Arafat - the Day of Arafat is the most important in the Hagg ritual. As the special dish on Eid-Ul-Adha is lamb the price of lambs rose significantly in the run-up to that four-day holiday.

Another festival is Ashura which varies in importance between the different types of Muslims - Sunnis have a day of fasting, while Shiites have a great festival.

Perhaps the best known is Ramadan which is in the ninth month of the Muslim calendar. Ramadan is a period of fasting that finishes with a three-day celebration called Eid al Fitr. That's when Muslims celebrate the end of their fasting and thank Allah for His help with their month-long act of self control, and that regularly boosts the price of sheep.

ENDS