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TimelessThe damp, rainy, unpleasant weather was symbolic of the attitude of the day in Minnesota. I am not sure exactly what I expected beyond another day of selling cattle in one of our nation's sale barns but that is certainly not what I found. I can't tell you how happy I am that my travel schedule allowed me to be in the Saint Paul, Minn., area on April 11, 2008. The "Ending of an Era" is what they called the last sale to ever be held in the South Saint Paul Stockyards and it went out with a bang. While I did write about the closing of this historic yards a couple of weeks ago, I am going to tell you what happened on the big day, because it caught me completely off guard. First, I arrived at the stockyards at 8:30 a.m. the day of the final sale. The parking lot was full of cars. Cattle were still arriving and local farmers there to unload animals had nowhere to park due to the huge, early crowd. As I walked down the catwalk toward the sales arena, the number of non-farm folks was striking. Inside, they were already selling stockyards memorabilia to a standing-room-only crowd. Honestly, I found the crowd's mentality to be somewhere between attending a basketball game and a funeral. They seemed happy to be at the stockyards one more time to buy little reminders of fond days gone by and then painfully reminded that it will never happen again. One example would be that of Dennis Swan, a cattleman from Balaton, Minn., who was so happy to tell me about the first time his grandfather sold cattle here when, in 1912, he walked market steers eight miles to be loaded on a rail car and hauled over a hundred miles to the stockyards. It seemed that as he was telling me, he realized that within months the 27-acre facility where that happened would be demolished and converted into a business park. The four TV crews that were present could only attempt to convey the emotional outpouring of the nearly 2,000 people that came for this last sale. The presence of non-farm media outlets included newspapers like the New York Times in addition to local and national radio, combined with all local TV stations brought me to realize that for this one day agriculture had actually captured the attention of someone outside of our community. The problem with that is it only occurred because they were busy reporting what used to be, rather than what is. South Saint Paul, as a town, will not miss the stockyards but few realize that the city would never have existed without the stockyards as its foundation. So many of our major cities in this country have similar origins. It was hard to sit through this sale knowing that there would be no more. I, as much as anyone, recognize the changes in agriculture and that the stockyards, that once united a divided nation by supplying food and a much needed economic boost at the end of the civil war, are less important in the big picture today. But still, emotionally, it is tough to come to grips with urbanization and its long arm pushing food production farther from the very citizens it is intended to benefit. Every time a stockyards or sale barn or even a farm is consumed by concrete, condos and consumers, we in agriculture became more of a distant memory. Probably the smartest thing the organizers of this "Ending of an Era" sale did was their special auction of the last animal. David and Paul Krueger donated a Simmental Angus cross heifer that ran through the ring at 6:52 p.m. central time on April 11, 2008. The $2,400 generated from the sale of this heifer was donated to a scholarship fund with hopes that it will inspire some young person to choose a future of agriculture. The Kruegers, who were anxious to assist with the final sale, told me they were asked if they would be interested in helping with the scholarship donation and they gladly did their part. As they looked through the set of yearling heifers they had kept for replacements, they realized that one had a pedigreed name of "Timeless." It seemed an easy decision to make. True enough, the business of food production is without beginning or end; but the fact that we, as food producers, are continually pushed "out of sight," requires that we now cry even louder so that we are not "out of mind." Next draft; okay, who will start the bidding ...... Editor's note: Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.FacesOfAg.com, or e-mail Trent at trent@loostales.com 4/21/08 Date: 4/17/08
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