I like the idea of the point system. Right now the education requirements are only a Meat Quality Assurance Class and a yearly mandatory meeting. You do have to make weight, but there aren't any placing requirements. In previous years the sale order has been chosen by a lottery -- you pick a number from a container at the weigh in. My children have always been the worst pickers! I don't believe there has been a time that we haven't been the last beef sold. Sometimes this has worked in our favor other times not so much. We are proposing a change that you would sell in the order the judge has placed you. Do you feel that the point system has benefited the project?
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For our sale order, I'm unsure as to how they pick it, but they do spread out the champions to help keep the bidders there longer. We also have to go to a Meat Quality Assurance class and they also have a mandatory meeting to start off the new project year...As far as the points go, I personally have benefitted a great deal from doing the activities to get points. When I first started showing, I became involved and joined the meats judging, livestock skillathon and quiz bowl teams because if you went to 3 practices and participated in the state contest, you earned 5 points. So, even by just doing 2 of them , I easily got the 10 points. I don't know if you have competitions like that in your state, but I would definitely recommend doing them because so many opportunities can come from these. I have been able to go to Denver, Omaha, and will go to Louisville to compete in the National Contests for those three teams I am on, and that is an experience that one can be VERY proud of and use to put on a college application, and the knowledge gained from those activities can be used in the showring during showmanship or even in the career one will pursue, which in my case, is a veterinarian. Even besides me, if you look at the other youth that have also participated in these activities, they are having the same success. This last year, our county swept the state quiz bowl competition, winning in all three age divisions. And our county consistently does well in most all livestock competitions. So I think that the points have benefitted the project a lot. Not to brag or anything, but we are always complimented as being the best county in the state because of the quality of our animals and how the youth in our county represent ourselves at state or even national competitions. And I think it all goes back to how our youth are educated because they have to go to the clinics or participate in these competitions, and they learn what they have to do to compete at our county because we have a really tough county fair where there are families that show at a national level, so that means they need to step up their game in order to compete with them.
Hope you can understand my viewpoint, I might have rambled on in some places... :-\