Hopefully we are seeing the end of the summer days and the kids are in the final push for the last summer show, the Missouri State Fair. My niece in Oklahoma has already had her county fair, gone back to school and now we wait for Tulsa in October. It seems like school starts earlier every year and we must navigate around the last fairs and deciding how many days can be missed at school.
I remember when my kids were still in school and they both played sports, my daughter in softball and my son in football. Both went to rural area schools that knew how important agriculture was in the community, but that still didn’t stop the stress of navigating mandatory practices and showing livestock.
Unfortunately, this is something that many kids involved in livestock deal with every fall and into the school season. How many days can you miss for livestock shows and what happens if you miss sports practices because you have a livestock show. I was one of the parents that stood up for my kids showing livestock and worked with the coaches to make sure my kids could “make up” practices before we left for shows or we figured out a way to get it made up before the next game.
I don’t know who decided that these kids showing livestock were not getting any “work” in when they were not at practice, but I would bet you that most of the kids showing livestock have put in plenty of work and hours just like they would have been at a sports practice. Loading and unloading the trailer, getting up early to get animals ready every day and even earlier on show day.
I understand that as a coach of a team, you have to make sure that all the kids are treated “equal” when it comes to hours spent on practice and that there are state rules regarding that as well. But I have never thought it was fair to penalize a youth when they miss practice due to a livestock show. I have never liked that families and youth have to sometimes make the hard decision about going to a show or participating on a school sports team.
I am not sure what the answer to this problem is and I am glad that my kids never had to miss any livestock shows and were always able to participate on their school sports team. Could it have been because the coaches did not want to see my face when I showed up at the school to talk about how we were going to navigate this season? I am sure if you asked my kids, that was probably the reason, but I also feel like there should be some common ground when it comes to sports and showing livestock.
We are also preparing for a few fall calvers and thinking about fall breeding season. Our calving season has changed up to having more spring calves and we would prefer a more even split. We had an issue a few years ago with our mature herd bull where he sustained an injury and our yearling bull just wasn’t up to the task yet, so we are still trying to get everyone back to a regular schedule and splitting the herd evenly.
We decided to hold over a few of our later spring calvers and transition them to the fall group. Since we show several heifers every year, they always end up with an “off” calving cycle just because it is harder to get them bred and keep traveling to shows. Unfortunately, that is the trade off when showing heifers, but once they end up in the herd and become cows, we expect them to breed on a regular cycle, no matter where that puts them in the calving cycle.
Our herd is small and we target a specific market with our cattle. Some are show stock as far as phenotype and some are geared more towards registered sales and seedstock. We still like performance and growth and we take care in getting proper birthweights, weaning weights and yearling weights. We also do carcass scans on the cattle so we know the numbers there. We halter break all the bulls we plan to sell as that makes them easier to handle even if they never plan to enter the show ring.
We always have animals in the barn and in the corral and I am certainly ready to get through with these hot summer days. It is time to start halter breaking the new projects, looking at upcoming fall and winter shows and looking forward to some cooler weather. Every year I say that we are going to slow down but that never happens.
Debbie Elder is a native of Ottawa County, Okla. and lives on her farm in Webster County, Mo. To contact Debbie, call 1-866-532-1960 or by email at [email protected].
