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St. Cloud sales barn closes after 46 years
ST. CLOUD, Minn. (AP)--Bidders' quiet signals dictate the flow of rapid-fire syllables in Steve Kampa's auction ring.
It was the last day for a sale of any kind at St. Cloud's only livestock sales barn.
Granite City Livestock Sales, once one of the state's largest sales barns, closed after 46 years. Second-generation owner Steve Kampa said activity has dwindled with the declining number of small dairy farms and the urbanization of St. Cloud.
"We're getting where we're kind of squeezed out," Kampa said.
He opted to close because dwindling numbers meant less competitive bidding, a disadvantage for sellers.
His father, the late Eugene Kampa, started the business east of St. Cloud near the state prison. It moved to its present three-acre site on Roosevelt Road in 1943, long before there were restaurants, shops or industrial buildings in the area.
"There were dairy farms right in this neighborhood," Kampa remembers.
He estimates that nearly 5 million cows and calves have passed through the sales barn gates.
At its peak, there were auctions four days a week, sometimes lasting past midnight. There were 35 employees. Buyers came from a five-state area. An aerial photo in the pine-paneled lunchroom shows about 30 cattle trucks lined up with deliveries.
But that changed with development and the advent of big farms that have less use for auctions. The turning point, Kampa said, was the federal dairy herd buyout program of the mid-1980s.
"It's never been the same since," he said.
The number of Stearns and Benton County dairy farms declined almost 63 percent from 1994 to 2004, although the loss of cows was less dramatic. Livestock auction barns still operate in Albany, Pierz and Long Prairie.
The number of sales barns statewide tends to hover between 35 and 40, although ownership has become more consolidated, said Michael Schommer, a spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.
In recent times, Granite City auctions fell back to one day per week. Hog and feeder pig sales disappeared seven years ago. The business has a dozen employees, mostly part-time.
The property has access to city water and sewer--and the kind of traffic counts that would make it attractive for a strip mall or bank, Kampa said. He's going to list it with a commercial broker. It's not suitable for the real estate auction work he does.
Kampa's new venture, Midwest Real Estate Auctions Inc., will keep him in touch with farmers and with the skills he developed 36 years ago at a Montana auctioneering school.
More recently, he finished getting his bachelor's degree in Christian ministry at Northwestern College in St. Paul. He might use that for volunteer work with youth. He already volunteers in prison ministry at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in St. Cloud.
Kampa's connection to inmates goes back to childhood, when they cleaned pens at the family's first sales barn site. "I used to sit on the fence with those guys," he said.
He tells the story while sitting on a vinyl stool at the counter of the sales barn lunch room. At on end of the room are booths where buyers and sellers lined up to settle their accounts.
Near the main entrance is a large portrait of a man in a cowboy hat--his father.
"I wonder what he would think," Kampa said. "But times change."
Date: 1/24/05
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