Author: George Heersche
Planning Unit: Animal and Food Sciences
Major Program: 4-H Youth Development Programming
Outcome: Long-Term Outcome
Cooperation between the Spencer County 4-H and FFA dairy programs are a model example for other counties.
Spencer County is very active in our 4-H dairy judging program. Many of their youth trained in the 4-H program eventually represent Kentucky in the National 4-H Dairy Cattle Judging Contest and the National FFA Dairy Cattle Evaluation and Management Career Development Event.
The National FFA Dairy Cattle Evaluation and Management Career Development Event has a portion where the team has to evaluate the production practices of a hypothetical dairy farm. They then have to give an oral presentation elucidating the strengths and weaknesses of the production practices and suggest changes to rectifying the weaknesses. Not many of the Spencer County youth are farm youth and none are dairy farm youth so I am involved in teaching them about proper dairy cattle management practices.
Spencer County has had the National Champion FFA Dairy Cattle Evaluation and Management Career Development Event team eight of the last 13 years including 2017. I have helped train all of these teams and they complement the three National Champion 4-H Dairy Cattle Judging teams I have coached.
This is copied from an email from Bland Baird, Spencer County Vo-Ag teacher: "Dr. Heersche has had a tremendous influence on our students, and without his help, our competitive success would have not been possible.
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