Birch Grove Farm sells everything ‘except the old man farmer and his wife’

WILLOW — Ted and Jean Berry have worked toward this day for months. And they’ve dreaded it for weeks.

This day they will watch and listen as the auctioneer sells 30 years worth of farm equipment, yard and garden supplies, camping and outdoor gear, tools, antiques and collectables, building supplies, fencing materials, household items, beekeeping gear, and animal care essentials such as a milking machine, feed grinders and a chicken plucker.

“It’s been a year and a half of decisions and a couple of weeks of dreading it,” Ted said.

The Berrys were two decades younger that spring day they parked their truck at Mile 79 on the Parks Highway and started walking in with a chainsaw to build what would become Birch Grove Farm.

“It’s hard to leave,” Jean said surveying the yard and crowd gathered for the farm auction Saturday. “We put so much of ourselves into it.”

“We started out here with just trees and a vision,” Ted said.

Jean was in graduate school in Hawaii and Ted was living in Wasilla in 1989 when he called to say he’d found property in Willow.

When she came home, they drove up to look at the property. After her graduation that spring, they flew to Florida to meet with the property owners and struck a deal to buy the land.

“It was a lot of work for just two people,” Jean said. “It’s too much for us to continue. If we stay, I know he’ll fill the barns again.”

Ted is a retired agriculture professor, farmer, businessman and auctioneer, and she’s a retired schoolteacher and farmer.

Among other things, the two started and sold Willow Self-Storage, operated a tree nursery at their farm and owned the first commercial herd of angora goats in the Valley.

“How things have changed,” Ted said. “We’ve been part of that.”

‘Who’ll give me 10?’

The auctioneer is perched on the back of a black truck, talking into a microphone linked to the speaker on the truck’s roof that broadcasts his voice to the crowd.

He’s in the moment, counting.

“I have five, give me 10, 10, 10. Who’ll give me 10?”

Staff members in orange safety vests help Mike Dewan of D and D Auction hold up each item to show the crowd before the bidding begins.

Baby chicks sell five for $30. A cream separator brings $300. The list of items to sell is long.

“We’re selling everything from chickens and guinea hens to a 1947 Farmall tractor,” Dewan said. “For the state of Alaska to have a farm auction of this caliber is kind of a novelty.”

An auction clerk also helps the auctioneer keep track of the sale price, keep a log of the items purchased, the bidder’s number and the purchase price, Dewan said.

He works on commission. “The more it brings, the more I make.”

Dewan said he never charges a buyer’s premium or attends auctions that charge such premiums in addition to the sale price.

“It’s an absolute auction — what you pay is what you bid,” he said. “We hope it’s the top end, they hope it’s the bottom end. It’s that tug-of-war.”

Ted is an auctioneer, but the two men agree it’s a bad idea to try to auction your own possessions.

“There is too much sentimental attachment to your own stuff,” he said.

The heated, raised flowerbeds and a floating dock, 500 railroad ties, an antique Johnson outboard motor with gas can, a 32-by-64-foot pole barn, which the buyer will have until August to relocate trees like balsam fir, hybrid bur oak, Siberian larch, lodge pole pine, or roses from the farm’s nursery, an antique sprint dog sled, a cabin sled — it has a story, Ted said.

“We’re selling everything,” he said. “Everything except the old man farmer and his wife.”

‘We all need something’

Two women laugh and smile as they sit in each end of a long, narrow livestock tank they have their eye on as a wading pool for their kids.

“We all need something,” said Merry Black, whose husband has a shop and is here looking, maybe for farm equipment or chickens.

Sheryl Fyfe’s husband sent her here.

“I came for a four-wheeler and found so much more,” she said.

Fyfe says this is the most people you’ll see together in one place in Willow outside of Willow Carnival.

For Char McClure, it’s her first time at an auction. She needs lumber for her house.

Five chickens sold for $30, but Black didn’t bite — she dropped out of the bidding at $20.

“There’ll be more things,” McClure said.

Dewan has done auctions from Ketchikan, Sitka and Petersburg to Kotzebue, Palmer and Nome.

He said he prefers auctions because the sale price is set by that day’s bidders.

“There’s no haggling,” Dewan said. “If 10 people all want the same thing, you get a fair price for it.”

Families share picnic lunches, old men sit visiting in lawn chairs and an endless parade of kids takes a turn admiring the brightly colored chickens in their cages, waiting to be auctioned.

“Auctions are a social event, Dewan said. “Like square dances used to be.”

Jean said they spent 20 years carving this Eden from the wilderness and had hoped to sell the place to a young farmer or hire someone to operate it, but they couldn’t find anyone who was interested.

Instead, they decided to sell the place and head south in their RV.

“It’s been a lot of worry and a lot of preparation,” she said.

Ted jokes about strapping a snow shovel to the back of the RV and driving south where the road takes them.

“When people ask ‘what’s that’ we’ll know we’ve gone far enough,” he said.

Contact Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.