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Sunset at the South Saint Paul stockyards

By Jim Chen at al.

This CAFO had become a doozy of a LULU. And now it's SOL and DOA. RIP, South Saint Paul Stockyards:

In a place that no longer belongs where it has always been, there rises from wood-slat pens the farewell lows and bellows of cold, wet cows. So long, so long, they call out to the oblivious human bustle. The stockyards of South St. Paul say goodbye.

The cattle adieu has been years in the planning, but now it is time. No longer can the end be forestalled by milk-and-meat memories of 122 years; by the boast that these trampled grounds once constituted the largest stockyards in the world; by the vital daily ritual of muck-flecked yardmen coaxing muck-flecked cows into the sales barn, where the auctioneer?s sweet serenade only hardens those bovine expressions of uh-oh.

Times have overtaken the stockyards, for reasons too obvious to dispute. Higher costs. Farms lost to suburban sprawl. The increasingly awkward presence of livestock in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, accustomed now to more sophisticated aromas than what wafts from the pens. . . .

Friday, April 11, 2008 [was] the last day, closing a deal struck over a year ago when the owner of the stockyards, the Central Livestock Association, sold off the last 27 acres of what was once 166 acres of mooing, bleating, undulating commerce. The new owners will soon bulldoze everything to make room for more buildings of light industry — pens for people.

Full post as published by Agricultural Law on April 15, 2008 (boomark / email).