August is the month for the county fair, including ours. This year, my daughters showed their 4-H market steers. It was my older daughter Cora’s fourth year and my younger daughter Clara’s first year. As a parent, I always struggle at show time because I wrestle with a feeling of inadequacy, as if I didn’t equip my children to succeed. In everything my children do, be that sports or school or 4-H, I expect them to work hard – and when they work harder than anyone else, they often come out on top. The coaches notice the girl who crossed the baseline during sprints first. Hard work has its rewards. In my high school locker room, a quote was painted on the wall: “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” We live by that around here.
Working hard works, well, until it doesn’t. And it doesn’t always work when my girls enter the show ring for the market judging class during the county fair. You see, the calves my girls fatten up and bring to the fair – they’ve known those calves since they were babies; they may have even watched them be born. They come right out of our herd of commercial cows.
At some point in the evolution of the cattle industry, the beef industry and the show cattle industry diverged. A decent commercial calf is rarely pretty enough for a good show calf; a show calf is often unequipped for the feedyard. They are different heads under the umbrella. Mostly, they stay in their respective positions in the industry – that is, until the fair in a rural county, and then they are all jumbled together. Our household is both unable and unwilling to purchase showy calves for the girls to feed, not with a pasture full of good calves. No matter how hard they work, how well they feed their steers and how much they practice showmanship, they will likely never win Grand Champion Market Steer because their calves look like commercial calves. After all, they are.
We tell the girls we can control two things: how well we feed our steers and how well we show them. Every year, we help the girls bring finished steers to the county fair and steers they can easily handle. In the four years we’ve been a 4-H family, we have brought eight steers to the county fair. The comments from the judges are usually something like this: “This is a plain-old good commercial calf,” or “This is the kind of calf I’d expect to perform well in a feedyard.” This year, Cora’s calf placed third in the heavyweight class. He was a big Charolais cross, and the judge commented, “Great job on getting this calf finished. He is just the kind of calf a feedlot manager loves to see.”
Cora, who has been at this longer, is used to the disappointment of not winning – and yet, each year, she holds back tears as she leaves the show ring. This year was no different. The kids whose families can and do purchase show calves mostly come out on top. Sometimes, even the underfinished Maine-Anjou beats out the top commercial calves. I get it, they are prettier. They were bred to look good in a show ring. I shouldn’t complain; come sale time, our community rallies, and all the kids end up with a good sale price, regardless of breeding.
One aspect of our county’s program I love is the carcass contest. Once the market steers are butchered, the carcasses are graded and ranked. Without their shiny hides to hide behind, the show calves can fall to the bottom. This year’s grand champion graded Select minus. And well, Cora’s third in class, good-enough-for-a-feedyard calf, graded Prime. They are just commercial calves.
