East Sounding Creek 4-H Report: The results are in!
By Coleman Norris
Breaking! Breaking!
The results are in! Many of our members are part of the Carcass project. We met on May 12, when we brought all our projects to the Crossroads Centre. Some very impressive steers and heifers entered the building. We started the day by weighing the animals to determine their final weight before they headed off to the butcher shop. We had a few steers weighing in at a whopping 1600 lbs. That is very spectacular because these animals were only on feed for 182 days. After we weighed in, the projects were all tied up in the arena, where the kids performed their own live evaluations, and their written calculations were compared to our evaluation judge. These animals were then loaded up on the truck and taken to Deerview Meats in Irvine. The members then met up at Deerview Meats on May 15 after the beef was butchered to enter the coolers to see their projects hanging. A professional grader then went through each carcass with the kids and explained to them how their beef measured up. The grader measures fat thickness, marbling, and size of steak. Every single beef hanging made my mouth water; I would eat any of those steaks in that cooler any day.
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OK! OK! I will get to what we are all waiting for. Drumroll, please! Our Winners this year, with only a few points in between, is BRANDT LYSTER Grand Champion Carcass with his sister on his tail, BREANNA LYSTER Reserve Champion Carcass. Breanna took home the buckle for Rate of Gain and Sadie Rude took home the buckle for her mad skills of the Live Evaluation. We also had a judging competition, in which Sadie Rude won in the Intermediate class and Fallyn Duque won in the Juniors. This was probably the closest Carcass race we have had between all the beef, so every single member should be very proud. It was a very eventful day and everyone’s hard work paid off.
New this year, our club started a new pen of three heifer project; we had five members join this project. They picked three heifers at the beginning of the year and tried to pick the 3 closest-looking heifers they could find. They also met at the Crossroads on May 12 and had Peggy Herman come and judge them. This also was a very hard class of heifers to judge for they all were spectacular pens. With only a point apart for the win, we had Brandt Lyster with his pen of Red Simmentals, Emma Westerlund with her pen of Black Angus, Dylan Woods with his pen of Black Simmentals, Doug Westerlund with his pen of Herefords and Rayna Murray with her pen of Simmental heifers. It was a great project for these members to learn what to look for when picking their pen of 3, and we hope to see this project grow next year.
I want to take this opportunity to thank Doug Norris for judging our Carcass live evaluation competition and Peggy Herman for judging our pen of 3 heifer projects.
This is Coleman Norris saying, “Do yourself a favour and put some beef on your plate.