Drake Livestock show

Wednesday I drove 50 miles to Drake, ND to attend their annual Drake Breeders cattle show. Each year in early February the small town of Drake has a showing of cattle on their downtown Main street. This event is held to get cattle together in one place rather than have potential buyers travel miles on back roads to check the cattle out.

I have not visited the event in the past as the weather usually was poor. I remembered the livestock show as being on the first Wednesday in February, but I wasn't positive. I tried to find an article in the local newspaper listing the event's date and time but found nothing. And I couldn't find anything about it on Google when I searched using "Drake", "cattle", "livestock", and "February 6". After attending the event and learning it was called the "Drake Breeder's Classic" I found a listing online about the event.

Even if I wasn't positive I had the correct day for the event, what the heck? I decided to drive down to Drake in hopes the event was being held.

The weather was ok for my drive to Drake. There was little traffic on the road - as usual. Halfway there the wind was blowing the loose snow across the road. ...Winter in North Dakota.

Along the way I watched jet contrails in the sky.

After waiting for the long Canadian Pacific train to slowly move down the track past the railroad crossing I was able to drive from the highway into the town of Drake.

Drake, population 322, is an old slowly dying small town. The buildings on Main street were old and could use sprucing up. The mainly brick buildings looked to be past their prime. A few bars, a cafe, and I'm not sure what other businesses there were.

For about a block and a half in length I found about 30 pens in the middle of the Main street. The street was wide enough that traffic could pass on each side of the pens, but I saw no vehicles pass by.

In each of most pens were three to four head of cattle. The cattle appeared to be mainly bulls. Signs were on many pens listing the farm/ranch the cattle were from, and a number of pens had fliers and brochures for upcoming bull sales. The brochures had statistics on bloodlines, birth weight of offspring, semen count... stuff that is helpful in finding the right bull.

The cattle all looked excellent. I found the number of Black Angus cattle to be lower than I expected and the number of other breeds like Herefords, Simmenthal, and Gelbvieh to be higher than expected.

At the far end in a pen by himself was a huge Hereford bull. In another pen, as I made my way back to my car, were five bulls. Two bulls did not like each other and were head to head in a pushing contest. As the pen was relatively small they pushed one side of the pen out slightly and the owner occasionally had to push the panels back and encourage the two bulls to quit their pushing contest.

I noticed that most all of the signs listing the cattle's farm/ranch listed both a man and woman's name and not just the man's name. It makes sense.

It seemed to me that the only people around, other than me, were other people showing their cattle. Small groups of two, three, or four people were here and there discussing farm stuff. I spoke for a little bit with one guy standing alone, but between my lack of in depth knowledge and the North Dakota farmers' natural reticence, the conversation was slow going before another exhibitor joined us and the conversation moved elsewhere. I wandered down the line of pens.

While the temperature was around 20 F, the sharp wind and cloudy skies put a chill in one's bones. I left after 20 minutes of looking. The exhibition left me wanting. Maybe I would have been more excited by the exhibition if I was in the market to buy a bull.

During my drive back to Minot I drove through a weather front. I passed under a thick line of gray clouds and it began to snow. Less than 20 miles later I passed through the front and returned to the same type of weather as prior to the front.