Volunteers help prepare for livestock sale
Cheryl Schweizer/Columbia Basin Herald Terra Pischel, Warden FFA adviser, hangs a sign in the lamb barn at the Grant County Fairgrounds on Tuesday. Volunteers got the barns ready for the livestock sale later this week.
MOSES LAKE — Volunteers turned out Tuesday morning to sweep the walks and prepare the stalls for the livestock sale this week at Grant County Fairgrounds.
The sale will be online. Livestock will arrive Wednesday and be evaluated Thursday, and the evaluation results will determine the order in which animals are offered for sale.
Chuck Yarbro Auctioneers, of Moses Lake, will run the sale. Bidding will open as soon as photographs of the livestock are uploaded to the auction website. That should be by mid- to late afternoon Thursday, according to the auction announcement on the website.
Bidding will close at different times for different livestock classes, with the auction scheduled to end at 5 p.m. Friday.
The animals will be on the grounds Wednesday through Friday and will need care while they’re there. So, volunteers spent Tuesday morning sweeping the barns and preparing the stalls. A lot of the work was done by 10 a.m.
“You get a bunch of volunteers in here, it goes pretty good,” said fairgrounds employee Dennis Motzkus.
“You couldn’t run this fair without the volunteers,” Motzkus said. Many have long experience with the fair, know what they’re doing, “and they get right after it,” he said.
Scott Mortimer, FFA adviser at Wilson Creek High School, said about 113 pigs and about 100 lambs were entered for the sale. There are fewer than 20 steers.
“We’re about half (of the usual entries) on steers,” Mortimer said.
In any year but 2020, Tuesday would’ve been the first day of the fair. But fairgrounds officials announced its cancellation in late May.
Quincy FFA adviser Mike Wallace said the sale is an effort to help kids who raised an animal for fair competition and need a place to sell it. Many 4-H and FFA participants decided against a fair project this year, but some had purchased an animal before the fair’s cancellation was announced. In addition, “there are some circumstances where this was their last year (to exhibit),” Wallace said.
The goal is to give participants a chance to market their animal, Wallace said, and at least not lose money.
Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at [email protected].