Going to a cattle auction isn’t most people’s idea of a weekend outing. But maybe it should be.
Much can be gleaned from a deeper awareness of how agriculture sustains us and ties us to the past. This agricultural structure supports civilization and constantly surrounds us, but fewer people than ever in human history have direct contact with the production and distribution of food. Therefore, they don’t know what it all means. Nor do they understand its implications for how they live.
Industrial food scientists have concocted a wide range of brightly colored and addictively flavored substances to fill our supermarkets, but even these semi-artificial edibles originate from living things—plant or animal—related to the plants and animals humans have been eating for thousands of years. Most food in stores and restaurants is still identifiable as a dead plant or animal. And plants still need to be watered and animals still need to be butchered so we can enjoy a hamburger at a fast-food restaurant.
Back to the Barnyard
I had the pleasure of visiting a sale barn for the first time this fall. The barn was located in Lanesboro, Minnesota, a little town abutting Root River on one side and cliff-carved hills on the other. With a row of brick and limestone buildings and wooden signs overhanging the steep streets, it looked like a vintage photograph.The sale barn itself was a collection of large, low sheds divided into hundreds of pens with wooden catwalks crisscrossing them above. On one end of the barn was the auction room: a small pen with bleachers on two sides and an auctioneer’s box at one end. Animals were loosed into the pen one at a time or in small groups where the buyers could evaluate and bid on them as the auctioneer spouted out numbers at a rapid clip.
As I first approached the auction pen, I noticed the pitter-pat and rat-a-tat of the auctioneer’s voice. He rattled off figures amidst a sea of other syllables I couldn’t identify—almost like a stutter but with more intentionality behind it—in a sing-song tone. With each animal, the fast-paced litany came to an abrupt stop with, “Sold, for 850” or “Sold, at a buck twenty-five” (meaning, $125).
After a brief pause, the next skittish calf cantered into the pen, maybe kicking a little, wide-eyed in the unfamiliar environment. Two livestock handlers flicked flags on the end of poles at the animal to steer him up and down the pen, and the auctioneer began pattering again with something like, “And here be a bull.” The sound was pleasurably hypnotic, but strikingly unnecessary. The auctioneer could’ve run the auction without singing his song, especially given the screens displaying the weight and current bid for the animal in the pen.
But the auctioneer’s patter is tradition, and no one sees any need to change it. It reminded me of the similar patter of a skilled square dance caller who mixes the instructions with his own kind of impromptu rhyming and half-song, matched to the fiddler’s music. Both a dance caller and an auctioneer integrate the pragmatic and the artistic.
As we found a place on the bleachers, I cast a glance around the room. Many attendees could only be described as proverbial “old-timers”—sturdy men in their 50s, 60s, and 70s wearing Western-style checkered shirts with jeans and worn baseball caps, the uniform of the American farmer. For the most part, they watched the animals come and go with Scandinavian stoicism and silence, one occasionally raising his finger to bid. Under those stolid expressions, their well-trained eyes sized up the animals. They ran calculations on feed costs, the price of beef per pound, and potential profits.
The Wisdom of the Simple
This scene had about it the venerability of age. Most people know that old things—like old people—deserve respect, even if we can’t put words to the why. Such was the case with the sale barn. The singing of the auctioneer, the pivoting of the livestock hands, the trotting of the animals—in this synchronized symphony of sound and sight, eminently practical yet refined to an art over generations, I saw something fundamentally human in its necessity for our bodily life, in its tradition and historical continuity, and in its humble and unassuming beauty.Experiences like these teach us wisdom. This is because wisdom is about understanding the totality of something. A sale barn reminds us of everything that goes into each bite we take: the plants that must grow and be eaten by animals that live and then die under our care, and the men who spend their lives guiding this process, season after season, year after year. Something complete—and timeless—comes into focus when we reflect on any ordinary ritual, like buying a cow.
