Did You Say Future Farmer of America?

It's official, I'm a legit FFA member. today we had our first competition. I wanted to participate In the range land competition, but my teacher told me it would take me a year to prepare! She and had me join the horse judging team instead.


I don't know if you've ever ridden on a public school bus, but let me tell you they are not comfortable. There were thirteen of us FFA members from our chapter, we had an entire school bus to our selves! Our bus driver seemed slightly deranged, but most bus drivers do seem to be a little on the crazy side. It was a two hour drive to Ephraim. the competitions were held at snow college.

There were over a thousand kids from all over Utah competing. Out of them, four hundred did horse judging like I did. It's interesting. You get judged on judging...

This is how it works. You get into teams of four, and then are split into four separate teams, so that you can't discus with your team members, which in my case didn't really matter, because no one in my group knew what they were doing either. After we were split into groups of about one hundred we all filed in and stood around the edge of an arena. there were so many people that in some areas people were two to three deep. The horses walk in. silence. You get disqualified for talking. we judged four classes, two reigning classes, western pleasure, and western education.

The two reigning classes were in my opinion, the easiest. They walk the horse around the arena once, and then lope it around once, all the while you're watching the horse. Trying to determine which has the best confirmation, whether or not there body is proportioned right, legs straight, muscle structure is pleasing, and the over all appearance. We did a class of four quarter horse mares, and a class of four quarter horse geldings. I matched the score of the judges, for full points on the geldings.

The next was western pleasure, pretty much just judging the horse while being ridden. you have to watch their lead, lope, obedience, etc. there were two mares and two geldings. I messed up when judging these horses because I missed the fact that The number three gelding messed up on its lead. but oh well...

The fourth class of judging was the Western education. The rider has to lope the horse to the back of the arena, turn lope back to the other end, turn and lope back to the end again, back up, turn in four cirlces the the right, stop, turn in four circles to the left. Judging this was kind of difficult. I placed a horse in second place because i thought it did really well , only to find out that it had been disqualified because she had taken an extra I'd failed to notice.

After all the classes were complete, we got together with our original team of four. we added all of our scores together. Two hundred being the highest you could get individually, i got 161. I'd think it to be pretty good, considering i had never done this before and had no idea what i was a doing. collectively as a team, taking the three highest scores, we made 512 out of a perfect score of 600. not bad for a team of beginners.

We didn't place in anything, but we all had fun! Even getting lost trying to find a McDonald's was a bit of an adventure! :) we were all hungry and tired. Back to the bus... and a windy ride home.