A Day at the Guadalupe County Fair

County fairs are receding as the rural land gets chewed up into subdivisions and commercial property. But, county fairs still exist and we found one in Guadalupe County, Texas where the county seat is Seguin and much of the land is agricultural--mostly for ranching as only a few crops are grown there at this time.
This county fair ran for three days a week or so ago, and so we decided to check it out as we always like to see farm animals and especially like to see the work of young people doing 4-H work.
Sheep and goat judging was going on when we arrived so we first took in the sheep judging, but quickly moved over to the goat judging as it looked more interesting.
The owners of the show animals must have their animal under control and with goats, apparently grabbing them by the head is one way to do it.  Then they have to have trained their animal to stand erect and with their back legs stretched out so that the judge can assess the muscles in the back.

It must take some amount of strength for the owners to do maintain control of the animal.  Notice how the younger, smaller people have a wide stance to keep their balance.
It must be a challenge for the judge as so much of the judging is judgmental (?).  Nevertheless, here he is checking the solidness of the back muscles in the one goat.  These are all in the Market Goat category, no special breed.

And, the winner was:

Next we walked over to the cattle barn where we were so late that most of the cattle had already been removed, but luckily for us, the winner of the exotic breed was still there.  We chatted at length with the young lady from Boerne who raised these two animals from calves.  Her business plan as a 4-H member is to buy calves, raise them, show them, and hopefully win such that she makes a nice profit.  In this case, she figures she spent around $2000 on the calves and feed and won  enough in prize money, plus being able to sell the grown steers for a net profit of about $3000.   With this profit she will repeat the process and grow her account so that she can pay her way in agricultural school.  This plus scholarships available from the stock raisers association will allow her to go to college with no student loan.  Yes, there still are enterprising young people.

The black and white steer is the exotic breed winner and the reddish brown steer is a Santa Gertrudis breed.

The next picture is a better single shot of the winner.

He likes to pose.

Next up was touring the crafts area.  Here is the canned goods display with the winning medals:

And finally, we watched the judging of western wear modeling by little kids.  Of course, their mothers made the outfits, but the kids modelled them.

And so ends a day.  We did not see a single individual with shorts and sandals and their dog on a leash.  All that would have been too risky as the manure, dust and dirt was ever present.