How California State Fair’s livestock competitions are training kids to be farmers, ranchers
Eleven-year-old Gentry Gudel has been in the livestock business for two years now.
“I have my own operation,” she said, describing her herd of cows on her family’s five-acre home in Wilton. She brought three members of that operation — Loretta, Marky and Austin — to enter into a junior beef livestock competition at the California State Fair in Sacramento.
She also brought stickers to hand out, some that read “BEEF: It’s What’s for Dinner” and others with a more simple “I ♥️ Beef.”
Kids towing trailers of cows, goats, rabbits, turkeys, pigs and sheep arrived at Cal Expo earlier this month to compete in the Junior Livestock competition. The aspiring farmers, ranchers and food system experts forge friendships, trade tips and show off their meticulously monitored animals in hopes of taking home cash prizes.
The competitors also are a bridge between American food producers and consumers, who typically only participate in the last leg of the food system — the one where meat miraculously materializes from a grill cook at a hot dog stand.
“State fairs and some county fairs are the only places where these kids get to advocate for agriculture to the public,” said Tiffany Clark, lead species superintendent for the State Fair’s competition.
Taped to the side of Gentry’s stalls in the warehouse-sized barn were posters provided by the California Beef Council. The judges evaluate the animals based on their market potential. Their weight, muscling, appearance, ‘structural correctness’ and growth capacity are all factors in judging the best livestock.
The pride in the duty and line of work helps counter the emotional connection with the animals when they head to the processor, the competitors explained.
“Only like two percent of the world gives the rest of the world food. Only two percent,” Gentry said. “So I know that when I let one of my animals get butchered that they’re feeding our country and our world, and that makes me feel better.”
‘We produce food and give it to the rest of the world’
The kids aren’t shy about their animals’ purpose — a purpose, 19-year-old Sophie Albiani said, that’s “much larger than anything that I’m here to do.”
“Just knowing that we produce food and give it to the rest of the world and that, that’s like our role in society,” she said. “Understanding that there is a difference between an animal that’s a pet and an animal that goes to market has always kind of been part of my life.”
Albiani has participated in livestock competitions for 12 years, raising hogs and small animals. This year, she brought crates full of rabbits to enter into the small animal competition. In the lead-up to the contest, she carefully monitored their food and exercise to build up their muscle mass. The rabbits are judged on their meat market potential.
They’re “completely different” from the rabbits Albiani has kept as pets.
Earlier this year, The Sacramento Bee reported on what happened when one young competitor decided she didn’t want her goat auctioned off for slaughter.
When the 9-year-old at the Shasta District Fair livestock competition learned her goat, Cedar, would be slaughtered, she sobbed in his pen. Her mother paid the competition to return Cedar to the family. They took Cedar to a Sonoma farm, where he lived until Shasta County sheriff’s deputies came knocking a month later.
The Sacramento Bee reported on the extreme lengths members of the Sheriff’s Office and the Shasta District Fair went to claw Cedar back to slaughter to “teach our youth responsibility” and “learn the process and effort it takes to raise quality meat,” as an email to the girl’s mother from Shasta District Fair Chief Executive Officer Melanie Silva read.
The saga of Cedar led to a federal lawsuit against the Shasta fair and county.
At the State Fair this year, there will be no auction portion of the event. Each competitor will decide what to do with their entries, whether that’s retiring the animals to live a life on the range or selling them to a processor. Gentry plans on entering Loretta, Marky and Austin into more livestock competitions. They aren’t slated to become beef anytime soon, though she said their offspring could.
A family affair
The kids are proud to carry forth “the agricultural legacy,” Albiani explained. Many of them inherited it from their parents.
Albiani grew up on five acres of land in Elk Grove, the daughter of an agricultural lawyer. Gentry’s parents operate a cattle company.
“It’s a whole cycle of life. Most of us grew up showing together, now all their kids are showing. You see a lot of the same people who you’ve been in contact with,” said Clark.
The family farm is as iconically American as apple pie. Ninety-six percent of farms in the United States are family-operated, according to the federal Department of Agriculture’s most recent data from 2017.
But American farm producers are aging. As of 2017, the average farmer was 57½ years old, and only 9% of the country’s producers were 35 years or younger.
Albiani, who now studies early childhood development at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, aspires to develop a curriculum that involves the youngest children in American agriculture.
Young kids are “building their ideas of the world and I wanna be able to put agriculture in it,” she said.
All of the competitors are members of 4-H, Future Farmers of America or National Grange, nationwide youth development organizations that aim to instill leadership and service skills — and recruit the next generation of farmers and ranchers.
“The reason you can live in a city, the reason you can do anything is because we have a stable food system,” said Albiani.
