“The only source of knowledge is experience.”- Albert Einstein The Lewis Cass Livestock judging team competed and hosted a contest at the Cass County Fairgrounds on Tuesday, March 18. This competition was to help judges all over the state gain experience and knowledge about judging and talking livestock. At this contest, Lewis Cass took over 48 students from both elementary and high school. Mr. Plank was asked how the contest went as a whole and said, “The contest went absolutely great. We had a huge turnout and beautiful weather. The Livestock producers who provided the livestock brought very high-quality classes and the group of officials were second to none.”

With running a successful contest challenges will likely occur. Mr. Plank said, “Hosting a livestock judging contest is always a daunting task from finding officials to finding classes of livestock and people willing to take time from their day and bring livestock and officiate lots of calls and planning must be done. We had to order enough pizza for nearly 300 people which ended up being 70 pizzas which were purchased from Fire Pizza. We also had to get twenty cases of water. We had to have 300 scantrons and 300 copies of class lists. Setting up gates and pens the night before is one of the harder tasks but ultimately finding transportation for our 40 junior high and elementary students brought one of the greatest challenges.”

Once all of these challenges were overcome it was time to compete. Mr. Plank was asked how the contest went and he responded, “Lewis Cass had the top 3 junior non-reasons teams. Nora Guy from Lewis Cass won the contest. Sam Vandeburg came in second place. The Lewis Cass Senior Reason Team was 10th and the second team was 21st. McCoy Taylor 15th and Matt Minnick was 24th as individuals. Another cool asset to the success of this contest was nearly all of the officials were Lewis Cass Livestock Judging alumni. Additionally, Claire Crum, who is the Cass County 4-H Extension Educator, was an integral part of putting on the contest, and we really appreciate her letting us use the fairgrounds.”

Junior, Matt Minnick was asked if this contest would help him compete at a higher level contest and said, “This contest will do a good job of helping me prepare for the bigger contests because it will help me knock the dust off and get back in the flow of competing.” Matt was also asked if he plans on competing at the collegiate level and he responded, “Yes, I do plan on continuing to judge at the collegiate level, and I do think contests like this will help prepare me, this is all about repetition and improving upon your past performances.`” When discussing his further goals for the rest of the year Plank added, “We hope to qualify for the state contest and then qualify for the National Contest.” Minnick added,

“Some of my individual goals for this year are to place top 10 in the state contest and help my team earn another national contest opportunity for next fall.”
All in all, this contest helped students advance their judging skills at a local level. This competition was a full circle moment seeing most of the officials being Lewis Cass Alumni. This contest will help students compete at even higher levels at state and national levels. Good luck to the Lewis Cass Judging team for the rest of this year!