Each year, we are more enraptured by the County Fair. It's not the rides and the entertainment, although we take note of that as we walk by. And it's certainly not the Demolition Derby! No, we make straight for the livestock barns, where all the 4-H kids can be found brushing, feeding, watering and cleaning their animals. Tiny 8-year-olds leading thousand pound steers into the wash rack, corralling 300-pound hogs, and scolding stubborn goats. Sometimes the child leans her whole weight on the lead line, and the goat just digs her feet in and pulls back. A lesson learned there---sometimes the most obvious thing is not the easiest. A goat will go anywhere (away from you), if you even threaten to grab her tail!
This year, we were determined to help out some of these kids, who are learning to farm, one animal at a time. So we signed up for the Junior livestock auction. Here, all the 4-H animals are sold at premium prices, giving a helping hand to these kids. We had our eye on a couple of hogs that we thought were pretty nice, but thought we'd wait and see what happened.
The first animal on the block was the championship lamb. The bidding started at $3 a pound, and rapidly rose to $19 a pound. Uh-oh. Maybe we wouldn't be getting ourselves a hog after all!
After that, it quickly became clear that businesses were buying the champions, because it's relatively inexpensive advertising for them, at more or less every County Fair from now until the end of time.
Then the 'normal' animals started coming to the block. Prices were all over the map, and it took us a while to figure out what was going on. These were all blue-ribbon animals, so people weren't deciding what to bid based on the quality of the animal... Then a woman down the row from us bought a lamb. And her last name was the same as the last name of the child with the lamb, and we thought 'Oh. Of course. It's not about the food. It's about the child'.
After that, we had a blast watching bachelor uncles (who'd been having a few too many on a hot August afternoon!) get into bidding wars over lambs, hogs and steers. Grandparents would have their heads together, calculating how high they could go on Jimmy's lamb, and still have enough to bid up the price on Rachel's hog.
We watched as friends of ours---Famer Phil, Thayne the butcher, Curt the rancher---bid on animals that were going for too little. So we followed their lead. After a couple of hours of just watching, a hog came up with a nervous little boy, who was obviously doing this for the first time. Crickets were chirping as the auctioneer called numbers. The opening bid fell to $2.50. And we bid on it. That got things started, and the price quickly went out of our league. So we did that a few more times, until we reconsidered the maximum we were willing to pay.
Then came another little boy, no more than eight years old, clearly adopted from overseas. We bid on his hog, the price went up a few times, and then we won the bid! So I took the bidding card away from John, because you can never tell with him at an auction...
After a few more minutes, we made our way to the cashier. As we were waiting to pay, the boy's dad walked up to John. 'Son,' he said, 'this here's the gentleman from Bellwether Farm'. The boy was so nervous, but he presented us with a little gift bag of pancake fixin's. We made small talk for a few minutes, talking to the boy about his hog, and if he had fun raising it and would do it again next year. (Yes and yes.) As they turned to go, his father made eye contact and thanked us most profoundly for helping his boy. So that was worth $4 a pound right there.
We paid for the hog, filled out the form that said we wanted Thayne to butcher it, and went on our way, feeling like we'd made an investment in something really important.
That evening, Dale went over to help Thayne load the animals in the trailer. They went off to a slaughterhouse in Brigham City (about half an hour from here). Two days later, they were back down the road, and Rusty, Farmer Phil's son who is apprenticed to Thayne, cut up our hog. About ten days after that, Thayne called us, and I went to pick up ham, bacon, chops, roasts, hocks, and half a freezer-full of the best pork we've had since we left Iowa.
So yeah. We'll do that again. Everyone wins, and we get bacon too... Now, the only problem is to figure out how to fit the cow in the freezer later this month. Guess I'd better get those chickens out of there, made into broth and canned...
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