4-H clubs continue for now

The news broke last week that our Emo Fall Fair is cancelled. Heartbreaking, but certainly understandable. It will be the first fair that I have missed in my life (or at least I think. . . )
There is a lot of rumblings going on about our 4-H Beef Clubs. The leaders have met once by zoom and are planning another meeting next week. As of now, the clubs are planning to continue; it may be by email or zoom or however it works for each club. Obviously, there will be no Steer Auction at the Emo Fair but if members chose to continue with their 4-H Project the steers are to be finished by the same date – August 15. The abattoir and processors have been notified and booked. As we have always asked, the members will be marketing their own animals. Are we going to have a show? We don’t know that. Perhaps by that time smaller groups will be allowed. We just must wait and see. We may end up having them all slaughtered and graded and that will be the members placing. After all that is the idea of the market steers, to have the top carcass. We don’t know that either. The leaders will make that decision. It is safe to say that things will be different.
Our businesses are going through a very tough time. The one thing we can agree on is that we all still will eat, and these finished steers will still be done right. Not all members will choose to continue with this uncertainty and that is fine. The animals (steers and heifers) still need to be registered with 4-H Ontario by June 1 so if you are planning to continue please get in touch with your Leaders ASAP. Please be patient. These times are strange and new to all of us and it is not easy to predict what the future will bring.
My new bull made his way home on Thursday. He seems to be calm. We kept him in for a bit but it is our breeding time so he didn’t isolate as long as he should have. He had 15 heifers waiting for him. All three bulls are out doing their thing now.
This being at home all the time is hard work! What a busy weekend. Normally I have to tell Marlee that she better get off to bed but on Saturday night she asked “Auntie Kimmie can I go to bed?” I decided that on Sunday I better not work them so hard. They ended up tying up three heifers and had them all calmed down by the end of the day. Two of them were already laying down. One of the bulls was up checking out what they were doing, and they were feeding him grain / hay and they thought we should maybe train him for the fair. I don’t think he was there because he wanted to go to the Fair. We are going to continue with training our heifers – working with the animals is still a good learning experience.