Stockyard: Robert Crabb Jr., below, is the new owner of the stock market--livestock, that is--that sets the Dow for cows across North Carolina.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: PICTURE THIS

When radios had tubes and sat on oilclothclad kitchen tables, a man could count on certain things. One was that somewhere on the dial, just before daylight would be a farm show featuring Reno and Smiley, the Briarhoppers or some other act, their corn-pone humor and ringing five-string banjos helping to bring up the sun. And that between tunes, a solemn announcer would read yesterday's prices from the Siler City livestock market.

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That didn't change when the farm shows and their country cutups jumped from radio to television. Even today--with cattle wearing bar codes and farmers picking up their checks minutes after the sale, thanks to computerized weigh-ins and payouts--the prices paid at Carolina Stockyards, the largest stockyard in the stale, still set the market price statewide.

One difference is a new owner, Robert Crabb Jr. and a group of investors bought the stockyard last year from Howard and Harry Horney, the brothers who had owned it since 1950. "One thing led to the other," says Crabb, 36, who grew up on a farm near Milton, a crossroads in Caswell County near the Virginia line. He began raising beef cattle in junior high school and had worked part time since 1991 as a livestock grader for the N.C. Department of Agriculture.

"We decided we'd open a livestock market in Eastern North Carolina but ran into a lot of opposition. I asked the Horneys their advice. They said the best advice they had was to bay this one." The stockyard opened in 1948, two years before the Horneys bought it. They moved it to the outskirts of Siler City in 1972.

Last year, the stockyard sold about $40 million of livestock, slicing off commissions that averaged about 2.7%. It has 14 full-time employees, though as many as 35 work on Mondays and Fridays, sale days when the market is a blur of motion, a smorgasbord of smells, a clatter of sounds.

The gate opens at 7 a.m. Buyers and sellers flow in, driving pickups with tall livestock racks or pulling closed trailers or piloting rumbling tractor-trailer rigs. Some come early because they think prices will be better when the buyers are fresher. Or maybe they don't mind waiting in line when they can pass the time talking. Small farmers spend most of their time alone. "They like to socialize when they get a chance," Crabb says. "A lot of the others have cattle as a second income. They have a job down at the garage or drive a truck or whatever."

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