Field Day

Things have been crazy busy lately thanks to the UC Davis Agricultural and Environmental Sciences Field Day, which was held this past Saturday. Field Day is where FFA'ers (and 4-H'ers, although they're pretty rare) come to compete in one of 26 different contests, including things like Parliamentary Procedure, Ag Mechanics, Vegetable Crops, Floriculture, Public Speaking, and judging animals - including poultry, livestock, horse, and dairy cattle. Each contest has its own coordinator(s), tests, competitors and judges, and the degree of difficulty and time require for preparation varies as well. I was one of the co-coordinators for the dairy cattle contest, which is probably one of the most intensive contests there is. Not to toot our own horn or anything.

Here's the way animal judging competitions generally work: there are several classes, and each class has four animals in it, generally numbered 1-2-3-4. Contestants evaluate the animals and place them from best to worst - for example, if sheep #2 was the best, then sheep #4 was second best, and sheep #1 was the worst, the placing would be 2-4-3-1. The contestants' placing is then compared to placings which have been made by the official ("expert") judges, and contestants are then scored based on how close they are to the official placing. There's a customary method for scoring, too, but I won't go in to that. As if that weren't stressful enough, after placing each class, contestants will have to give oral reasons on one or more classes - go into a separate room with the official judge(s) and, from memory, recite the reasons why they put those animals in that order.

In most cases, the other side of the contest is fairly straightforward. Whoever is putting together the contest chooses a class of animals, maybe gives them a bath and/or a haircut a few days before Field Day, and puts them in a pen for all the FFA'ers to judge. Simple, right? Straightforward. Easy. To the point. I had to choose dairy cattle. *sigh*

Dairy cattle are all shown during the contest - not put in a pen, but actually paraded around on a halter and posed so that contestants can see them all at the same time. This means that we start putting classes together in January, then halterbreak all the animals that haven't been shown before (usually about half of them). Dairy cattle are also clipped for judging - and a holstein cow has a LOT of hair. Clipping works best if the animal is clean, and cows love to get dirty, so each cow gets probably three or four baths in the two weeks leading up to field day. We have five classes on Field Day - that's 20 animals that all have to be halterbroken, calm enough to show with a bunch of people staring at them, washed, body clipped and cared for. In addition, classes are run two at a time, which means that we have to have at least 8 people trained and available to show them during the contest while everyone else is herding FFA'ers, keeping cows clean, getting the next classes ready, taking care of the 3 official judges, and generally putting out fires.

The last few days before Field Day are especially hectic. During the last week, we take ALL the cows and heifers out to the show area to get them used to it, and finish clipping. We also go over our entries and put together the judging cards the contestants will use to mark their placings - someone else prints them for us, but we still have to tear apart the three-card sheets and bundle them into a neat little packet for each contestant. The day before, we put up the show ring, make posters for each ring and each reasons room, rearrange heifers, put straw in the barn where the cows will stay while they're not being shown, organize the show halters, and do whatever else hasn't been finished. Then on contest day - remember how they love to get dirty? - we're up at 3:30 AM to wash all 20 cows, get them tied in the clean barn with feed and water, and get ready for the contest to start at 8. Then we're off and running with cows being kept clean, shown and returned to the barn, FFA'ers and officials judging, lunch (which was delivered an hour and a half late), and running reasons. We had 86 contestants this year (!) and each of them had to give three sets of reasons - even running all three simultaneously, it still took about 3 hours to do Reasons. Once reasons are done, we bring the cows and heifers back out for the "critique," which is when the officials to tell the contestants the placings (and why they placed the class that way). After critique, the contestants scatter, we get the cows taken care of and put away and take everything down again, clean out the barn, and turn into vegetables.

This year's contest went extremely well, thanks to all the volunteer help we had and some herculean work from my co-coordinator Gretchen. The judges were great, none of the contestants cried/complained/got run over, the cows (mostly) behaved, we had Halley scanning all the judging cards and keeping up with tabulations so we could get done quickly, and in general everything just worked (with the notable exception of lunch, but what can you do). Here's hoping next year goes as well!

PS. Sorry this is so long! I could have written three times this much and not covered all of the details...but you get the picture.