My daughter shows market cattle. She also livestock judges, competes in a myriad of FFA and 4-H competitions, and is sorta beyond intense and driven. I might be proud of her.
I also might, on occasion, spend a Saturday morning driving her around to various show cattle ranches in our area so she can preview the stock before auction day.
Yep, this past Saturday that's exactly what I did.
Now here's the thing, I love cattle. Their floofy hair, airplane wing-like fuzzy ears, and slimy noses draw me in like a hoarder to an estate sale, but showing them is definitely not my thing nor a world I am super fond of.
However, it is my girl's passion, and like all parents who want to try to help their kids launch into adulthood, I facilitate things.
Hence, being at a cattle ranch oohing and ahhhing at freshly blown dry show babies this previous Saturday.
My kid, she's s junior in high school and very well experienced at this sort of thing, so she doesn't need my help when it comes to market steer selection. She knows all about confirmation and how they need to move, gain, and the type of hair they need to excel in the show ring. She doesn't even need me to drive her around any more. Really, she just likes me to go with her, and you know what, I like to go too.
One, I get to check out all the super fantastic babies! However a human feels about cattle production, you have to hand it to humans, we have selectively bred cattle over the millennia into meat producing specimens deluxe.
I also enjoy talking with the people in the show cattle world and seeing their facilities. We have a group of show calf breeders in our North Idaho panhandle that truly do care about what they are doing and the kids who show their animals. It's nice seeing that community come together. Even if they do want you to buy from them instead of the other breeder;o)
My Izzy knows the all the breeders well enough that they let her go walk the calves around to try them out, just like she is buying a fur-covered Tesla, she test drives them. I swear they are almost as expensive too, for just like everything else, the price of the calves has increased more than a bit too, like almost doubled.
And that makes me wonder, with the hay crisis, price of feed and equipment exploding, which in turn increases the prices the producers have to charge just to stay afloat, how long are show cattle going to be a thing for the bovine obsessed youngsters across our country?
But I suppose that is a musing for another post.
In the meantime, I am going to go assess the state of my pocketbook so that I can bid on this little heifer, she is just the cutest.
And my girl did buy herself a marvelous little baby for this year's market steer project, I'll do an entire post on that sweet little pumpkin, for that is his name: Pumpkin.