News : Members of the Vinton FFA Chapter Learn About the Utter Importance of Dairy!

FFA members walk around judging the dairy cattle, preparing their reasons for the scores they gave

Kaden Kerkman looks at different cheeses to see what they are, and what the differences are between them.

By: Co-Reporter, Alana Fleming

On Thursday, September 15th, members from the Vinton-Shellsburg FFA Chapter went to the Tri-State Dairy contest in Calmar to test their knowledge about different dairy aspects. Some members went to a dairy cattle judging contest, while others were in dairy products.

Christopher Fleming, Kail Evans, Will McKenna, and Clayton McKenna started with the dairy cattle judging. They judged in the morning by watching cattle walk around a tent. They had to give them a score and reasons for why they received that score.

Later on in the day, they had to take a test over their general knowledge of dairy cattle. Kaden Kerkman, Yasmine Rogers, Rylee Manning, Alexa Henkle, Chloe Sanders, and Braedon Hepker had fun in their part of the dairy contest as well. These individuals had a dairy products contest. They had 10 different milk samples and had to see what the defects were with the samples.

Then after they had sampled the milk, they went on to a dairy versus non-dairy products portion. They would have to sample different items, to see whether it was made with dairy or not. After all the tasting they had to go and take a cheese identification part. They had to go through yellow and white cheeses to classify what they were.

The last thing they had to do was take a general knowledge test about dairy. Yasmine Rogers, Dairy products evaluator, says, "I got out of my comfort zone, I learned a lot about how to tell if there's something wrong with milk."