Homestead
BDN’s Homestead section is a celebration of rural life. Our writers cover small farms, animals, DIY solutions and fascinating Maine people who find unique ways to live simply. Read more Homestead stories here.
The cattle entered the ring in front of Jeff Tilton two or three at a time on Saturday.
He was comfortable on the microphone behind a wooden podium in his spacious Corinth barn, running a spring cattle auction for a busy crowd the way he has for decades. Trucks and trailers lined the road outside; cows mooed loudly in the rain.
Tilton spoke over them, seeking bids in a rhythmic chant-style he perfected as a young man by pretending to sell passing telephone poles from the cab of his auctioneer uncle’s truck.
He’d been up since 5 a.m., would continue working until 9 p.m. and had spent the past two weeks preparing for this semiannual sale. Roughly 300 animals sold over the next three hours.
Buyers filled seats around the auction ring, packed the side entrances, sat on stall dividers and climbed a ladder to watch from the hayloft, their feet dangling above the cattle queued up in the “alleyway” to enter the ring.
Some had attended every sale Tilton has held. The crowd included old timers, young adults, children and a baby. They visited the food truck out front for French fries and laughed at Tilton’s banter.
Though he knows his business and his customers well, he still feels a little spark of nerves when he starts every sale, which speaks to his dedication. After 35-plus years, he’s still just as interested in the animals, the farm machinery and the fast-paced transactions.
He’s the third generation of his family to run agricultural auctions. But his business is the only dedicated livestock auction house surviving in the state, and he expects it will end with him.
A lifetime in the industry has given Tilton a front row seat to 60 years of changes in rural Maine, especially the loss of small family farms, dairy operations and infrastructure for livestock producers. He finds those changes sad, he said, but one thing that characterizes his agricultural community is its adaptability.
“It’s just a way of life that’s maybe going away, but I don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard to say. I would be sad to see it go, for sure, but I guess that’s why I keep hanging on.”
Tiltons have been running livestock auctions for more than 80 years on Puddledock Road, where his grandfather started out buying and selling horses. His uncle Ben, known as Jock, later became an auctioneer and ran weekly livestock sales.
Forty years ago, they could go out in their truck to buy, sell and trade up and down the road all day, every day.
But even in Jeff Tilton’s youth, things were changing. Maine’s dairy industry shrank rapidly in the late 1970s and early ’80s. His family ran many auctions for farmers leaving the business, selling their lifelong investments in animals and machinery in one day.
“You know, they’re crying when you’re leaving the driveway, because it’s a lifetime for them, and it’s very hard, because that’s all they’ve ever done,” he said.
Maine had 1,217 dairy farms in 1974 and now has around 140, trending toward fewer, larger operations milking hundreds of cows instead of a few dozen. That can make it harder for smaller farmers to compete at auction.
As Amish communities grow around Maine, they’ve become regular customers who help run Tilton’s sales and hold auctions of their own. But even some of the Amish farmers he knows have gotten out of dairy.
Things have changed for beef producers, too, since Tilton took over the business from his uncle in 1999. Slaughterhouses in the Bangor area closed, and though some remain, farmers can’t easily send a few animals for processing. Instead, they wait until they have a truckload, or 40 head, to go out of state.
The loss of infrastructure and diminishing number of cattle overall are trends that feed off each other, in Tilton’s view.
With fewer animals, he stopped holding weekly auctions about 25 years ago and moved operations down the road, buying and selling cattle to out-of-state markets weekly in between auctions. He moves one or two semi-loads of them each week, and during the fair season runs 4-H auctions around the state.
Other auctions have closed, including the last small animal sale in Fairfield last year. Maine’s state licensing database shows only one other livestock auction, in an Amish community in Palmyra. Tilton has seen many people try unsuccessfully to start new ones.
“This is the type of business, in this part of the country, where you have to almost be born into it in a way,” he said. “Not necessarily, but in a way, and it takes many, many years to build up. If I hadn’t had my grandfather and my uncle before me, maybe things would’ve been different.”
That family reputation has helped him, he said, though auctioneering takes thick skin. Sellers aren’t always satisfied with the results.
Some animal welfare activists have also targeted auctions for selling sick animals or to people unprepared to care for them. Tilton said it’s not possible to police the sales, but he sees himself simply as an agent, and argued that auctions can also get animals out of bad situations. His own cattle and horses are well-fed, he noted.
He believes there’s room in the state for one more auction house and that the right person with an established reputation could succeed. Last year, he added small animal auctions, which now attract hundreds of people; 900-plus rabbits, chickens, sheep, goats and other livestock were sold last month.
The business still interests both him and his regular attendees, who come for entertainment and socializing on top of their transactions.
Right now, he doesn’t plan to slow down.
“I’ve thought about it more the last few years, and it’s really kind of sad to me … after all the generations and all the time and all the work and everything it took to get here,” he said of the idea that the family business won’t continue. “But you know, I’ve always thought, well, everything happens kind of for a reason. I guess that’s the way I want to look at it.”