The latest store sale at Mortlake showed signs it was bucking the trend of recent plummeting cattle prices.
Agents yarded around 4000 head, which was a significant increase from the yardings of about 2000 in recent months.
The positive prices were credited to the lines of good-quality cattle offered, including well-bred yearlings and weaners.
Steers were dominant in the sale, making up about three-quarters of the yarding, but while there was good lines throughout, the sale offered a varying degree of quality.
Strong competition from the galleries also encouraged prices to rally, with interstate interest from South Australia, along with buyers from the Wimmera, Gippsland, northern and western Victoria attending the sale.
Feedlotters JBS, O'Connors, TFI and Teys were also in attendance and giving extra competition.
Well-bred steer prices were unchanged to 20 cents a kilogram softer, with extra competition coming from the feeders at times.
The top cents a kilogram price of the day was in the Angus steer run, which went to a pen from Windarra Farm of 23 Angus steers, 295 kilograms, which sold for 328c/kg or $967 a head.
Southern Grampians Livestock & Real Estate livestock agent Glenn Judd said the good lines on offer like Windarra's were generally light in weight but very well sought after.
"That [top-priced pen] were nice calves, and there was a demand for quality calves like them," Mr Judd said.
"You would get good runs of 10 or 20 cattle pens that at least three or four of us wanted to buy."
Most of the plainer-type cattle sold between 200-280c/kg.
Mr Judd said the high number of cattle yarded was due to many keeping cattle for a while, looking to ride out the downturn in prices, but had got "to a point where they either had to have hay, or they had to buy hay, and you couldn't do everything".
"So you've got to unload, and some people would have sold their annual runs of cattle in in this sale as well which they do normally within a spring environment," he said.
"Because the season's closing down, it's a bit drier than last year, but it's also a normal year in that people have already done silage in certain places down this way already."
He said he expected good lines of weaners could continue to be sold at Mortlake into November, despite the downturn.
Some of the steers outside of the quality runs were 20-40c/kg cheaper as restockers who were present were more selective in their buying.
Heifers also sold 20-30c/kg cheaper than last month with some lower-quality pens back by 70c/kg at times.
