Cedar Lane Auctions a popular Tuesday stop in Salem County

By MILES JACKSON
AFP Correspondent

UPPER PITTSGROVE TOWNSHIP — A large sow of mixed heritage sat in the back of a wagon apparently unaware of her fate as the crowd gathered around at Cedar Lane Auctions in Salem County.
“A good, healthy sow just weaned 11 little ones,” said auctioneer Mike Cliver. “Come on, whattaya give ...” as he trails of into the quick, staccato calling of the bids.
The sow roots for morsels as the auction continues and shortly the sale is completed by a $47.50 bid from a man who declined to give his name.
“A lot of meat there,” he said, giving an idea of what the sow’s fate will be.
And so it goes on Tuesday afternoons  at Cedar Lane Feeds, a country-style pet and livestock supply store Raymond and Joan Brooks built out of two barns where heifers once were raised for their now dormant dairy operation a few miles away.
Inside the stout, concrete and steel buildings, Raymond Brooks has assembled an eclectic array of calves, goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, geese eggs, even a little produce while outside lots of hay, large and small, baled and rolls wait for buyers.
Brooks said the auction offers local farmers a place to sell lots large or small or just about anything, including a few lots of tomatoes and cucumbers.
“When Cowtown Auction closed up, there was no place for these folks to go,” said Brooks, a sun-baked, sinewy man who has spent his life milking cows.
“Now we can give these folks a place to sell one chick or dozens of chickens-size of the lot doesn’t matter,” Brooks said. “We cater to anyone who has good, healthy livestock, eggs or whatever for sale. We just take a small cut off for expenses.”
Families often include children to look at what may be the next 4-H project and immigrants from Asia scope out goats, a staple food in their native land.
Then there are the men with wide brimmed cowboy hat and cowboy boots that have seen more of the stirrup than the dance floor.
“Not buyin’, not sellin’, not this week, ” said one cowboy with dust crusted books, well-worn jeans and an impassive look just below a straw Stetson pulled down to his eyebrows. “But you gotta come out to see what’s on the market.”
Hay, in bales and in large rolls, seemed to be a top seller with trucks and wagons jockeying to get Brooks to load up the rolls or old-fashioned hand power loading up the bales.
With the number of buyers picking up the hay in horse wagons, Brooks said New Jersey’s status of having more horses than Texas creates a good market for baled hay
Inside the building, a long row of eggs brings buyers looking for a taste of free-range eggs sold at half the price of the supermarket.
“Come here every week for eggs,” said Bill Hash, a man with a pure white Captain Ahab beard and a broad smile. “Supermarket eggs don’t hold a candle to these eggs. You know these eggs are fresh and have a farm-raised taste to them. Those supermarket eggs could be three months old.”
Brooks harbors no illusions about replacing Cowtown, at the time of its closing two years ago the largest livestock auction in the state and one of the largest in the region.
“But we give a chance to some of the people want to sell or buy something,” he said. “With Cowtown gone, they had no place to go.”
And Cedar Lane Auction isn’t the only small operation to spring up to fill the vacuum left by Cowtown’s auction closing.
The rural Burlington County town of Tabernacle has a small auction with livestock on Saturdays and a horse-only auction on the third Friday of each month and small livestock and feed every Saturday night.
Outside of Cedar Lane Auction, two Vietnamese men talked of coming from 40 miles away to look over the sale.
“When the big auction closed, nobody had a place to go,” said the older of the two, who also declined to give their names. “And that type of thing isn’t going to last long. People are going to start their own auctions to give farmers like us a place to buy and sell.”
“That’s the way it was where we come from,” the younger man said of his native land he left shortly after the war.