Two blue ribbons folded like satin tents over the left pocket of Hannah Cargill’s blue jeans.
Harold, the steer she raised for the last six months from infancy, had just finished second, or ‘reserve champion,’ at the Hopkinton State Fair’s 4-H Livestock Show and Auction. He sold for just about $9,000 to a bidder standing in the sidelines.
Muzzled with green rope, Harold had followed Cargill in circles around the show ring, his imposing muscles rippling under an obsidian hide. Raising animals for slaughter is part of life on the farm.
Cargill expected it would be Ferguson, the small lamb that earned her second blue ribbon of the day, that she would miss most.
“At home, he’ll come up to me every day and let me pet him. He just sits there with me, and I get to have those moments with him. And you know that time’s running out,” she said. “They’re basically your best friends. You have your human best friends, but you also have your animal best friends.”
Cargill, 16, has early memories of showing market lambs across New England’s fair circuit with her family, which owns a farm in New Ipswich. She remembers observing her first lambing at age 5, which turned out to be a smooth and uncomplicated labor for the ewe and “not a bad first birth to watch.” Three years later, at age 8, she began showing sheep with 4-H, a youth development organization run through the UNH Cooperative Extension.
While others attended the Hopkinton State Fair to thrash from ride to ride on the midway or to sink into a warm cushion of fried dough, these 20 young people from across New Hampshire descended on the fairgrounds behind Hopkinton High School on Labor Day weekend for a much different purpose.
For the past year, they bred, raised and advertised their beef, dairy, swine and market lambs to potential buyers, having cared for their animals’ wellbeing under the strict oversight of a 4-H superintendent. In the show ring on Monday, they prepared to part ways with their ‘projects,’ cognizant both of the finality of their lives and the ends they served.
“It’ll hit me tomorrow when I don’t see him in the pen,” Cargill said of Ferguson. “If you grow attached to one, it can put a hole in your heart for a while.”
Along with a $25 refundable administrative fee, the emotion of separation is the price of admission many 4-H’ers pay for their participation in the livestock program. The proceeds of the sales go directly to the young farmers who can choose to reinvest and raise another animal the following year.
Guy Larochelle has seen some children over the years, especially younger first-timers, cry when parting with their animals after an auction. Rather than being a liability, care is considered an advantage in the show ring.
“It’s hard on all of them, but it’s all a part of the process. Just look at these 4-H’ers working on these projects. They’re well muscled, big, fed right,” said Larochelle, who is the committee chair of the livestock auction and serves as the superintendent for the beef category. “If the kids have done their jobs, and we’ve done ours, they’ll all sell.”
4-H’ers are responsible for every aspect of their animals’ rearing, including daily feeding and care. Superintendents monitor them for good husbandry practices and the absence of any growth hormones or antibiotics 60 days before the auction, and guide 4-H’ers through the process of pitching prospective buyers, who must be present at the auction.
Larochelle remembers the tradition well: He began showing sheep through 4-H as early as 10 years old.
“It was all summer long and teachers kind of missed me during the school year, too,” he laughed.
Twenty years ago, when he moved to Webster to establish Sweet Meadow Farm, he hoped to diversify the 4-H lamb auction with more animals. Space constraints and dwindling attendance at the Hillsborough Fair in New Boston pushed him to move the show and auction to Hopkinton, which welcomed the 4-H program with open arms.
In January of each year, Larochelle begins making ‘harvesting’ appointments for the animals he expects will be sold during the auction several months later. Two meat processors — Bator’s Farm and Lemay and Sons — will provide on-site services during the week after the Hopkinton State Fair.
“That’s what farming is. If a dairy cow doesn’t cut it, it becomes a hamburger,” Larochelle said. “This is where it starts. It doesn’t start at the grocery store, it starts here.”
While confronting death can be challenging, most children who participate in 4-H already approach the auction with a deep knowledge of the food system and an awareness of life cycles on a farm, said Sydney Wilson, secretary of the Merrimack County Livestock Committee.
Wilson, who lives in Nottingham, showed black angus cattle as a part of the 4-H program for years, a passion she inherited from her mother, who showed the same species for 40 years. She learned to interpret her own feelings through the filter of hard work.
“It’s not like a plant or a pet rock, it requires dedication. It doesn’t matter if you’re sick or you don’t feel good or its raining or snowing, you have to go care for that animal,” she said. “The way my mom always explained it to me was that this is an awesome opportunity to give that animal the best life, and it’s also an opportunity to feed your community.”
For Landon Akerstrom, a 17-year-old from Gilmanton, participating in 4-H yields even more tangible rewards: Akerstrom plans on pursuing his goal of becoming a veterinarian after graduating high school and hopes to put the money he’s made at auction toward a college education.
He showed his pig, Clyde, alongside his sister Lucy Ackerstrom’s pig, Hibiscus. Both received competitive bids.
“There’s a lot of responsibility and a lot of hard work,” Landon Akerstrom said. “It’s unique in that you learn a lot.”
Like him, Cargill aspires to care for animals in the future. Becoming a vet might prove to be too academically challenging, she predicted, but she’s interested in becoming an ultrasound technician as an alternative.
For her, the birth, death and all the care that happens in between are part of the same experience.
On her family farm, Cargill has seen traumatic lamb births that resulted in a rare death before a life even began. The process of weaning a lamb from its mother is “kind of like when you turn 18 and you move out of your parents’ house, and you just go out into the world,” she said matter-of-factly.
She recalled showing her first steer at the Big E in Springfield, Mass. last year.
“It was very sad because I put so much work into doing my first cow and then it just goes away and you just sell it for money,” she said. “But then I realized, well, this is what I do. It’s sad, but it’s what I do.”