Skip to main content

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.












Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Aermotor Windmill Lives

The Aermotor windmill is probably the oldest iconic windmill In the United States today. We bought one that was very old at a seller's booth at the Round Top antique market. This was back in the late 1900s. So that makes it 20 years ago or so. We first erected this windmill In Fulshear in the backyard. We had to get Architectural Control Committee approval to do this. Because some of our neighbors may have some bad experiences with a neighboring windmill, we had to assure them that we would not let the brake slide and provide that nasty shrieking noise.  Other than that, there was no objection to looking at a windmill.  W e erected the windmill in Fulshear.  It was quite a chore for us as we had no idea where all the parts fit together and how they were arranged.  For example, we learned that the sail wheel with its struts is built with the same concept as a bicycle wheel with its spokes.  After much head scratching and consulting the internet we had it to ...

Cause and Effect

 We have this great world atlas book published by the National Geographical Society, which by the way, we bought at the local library used book sale for $2. Probably this low price of the book pains the Society but it sure makes my reference to maps an easy task without having to wake up my computer. The book occupies a permanent spot on a book stand in our breakfast room, standing ready to supply map information on request. The book happened to be open to the page showing the whole of Antarctica featuring all the outposts and even some commentary of scientific significance. One such comment was on ice coring data of historic temperatures and carbon dioxide content.  I can understand how the CO2 content of the ice can be preserved over many centuries at varying depths, but I am unsure how the prevailing temperature of some thousand years ago can be preserved in the ice cores--but that's another issue that we will not get into here. So here is the comment on the data of the ice...

Cat Makes BIG trip

Cats don't travel all that well, but this cat did pretty well, especially after we told her that it was either this three day trip to Alpine, Texas or to stay in the cat hotel for those three days. So, having made her choice, we departed with her in the cage---a screened enclosure about 3 feet cubed.  For the first 30 miles, a lot of complaining, but then all was quiet.  She had burrowed under the foam mat and was hiding from this reality of travel. In Del Rio, we opened the cage door and she then opted to settle into the foot well of the back seat area.  We often were concerned with her jumping out of the car when we stopped for gas and whatnot, but the opposite was true--it was hard to get her to leave the car. The first night in a motel (Quality Inn in Alpine ---good place and good for pets) was a hoot.  We carried the cage up to the room on the second floor and then opened it.  She cautiously stepped out and then spent the next hour investigating every no...