Fair Enough
When I attend 4-H auctions, I often hear the auctioneers talk about the amount of work 4-H'ers devote to their projects. The 4-H beef project, for example, is a nine-month effort, while the dairy project is year-round. Four-H'ers work through the difficult winter months to feed and care for their animals.
There are some 4-H'ers who wash and blow dry their steers every day, even during freezing weather. This takes a lot of dedication, but it also builds character.
When the community steps up to support 4-H'ers, the bids should reflect not just the animals being sold, but the work ethic of the respective 4-H'ers.
Animal care always involves hard work but even more so in the winter. Four-H'ers have to lay down bedding to keep the animals warm at night. After a week or so, all of that bedding has to be hauled out and replaced with fresh straw. It's a constant cycle.
As for feed and fresh water, this is where an efficient system will pay off. Our farm didn't have heated waterers, so my brother and I had to chip ice out of the watering tank that our steers drank from. Today, families use heated buckets and more advanced systems.
Feeding steers meant we first had to load ear corn into my father's old Ford pickup and haul it to the local elevator. The workers there would grind up the corn, add supplements, and then we—usually my brother and I—would load 50-pound bags of feed in the pickup. Once we arrived home, we would unload the bags into the barn. That was the process if everything worked well. During the blizzard of '78, we had to clear a path to the corn crib and remove the 10-foot-high drift in front of the barn. That was an all-day affair!
Four-H'ers who raise their own livestock have special challenges. For example, pigs that are born in January need constant attention—and warmth. My father used to have a propane heater in the farrowing house to keep the piglets warm. Failure to maintain a warm temperature would mean losing all those little pigs. Whenever we let the sows outside to eat, we had to promptly close the wooden doors so the cold wouldn't come in.
Although today's 4-H'ers probably have more modern facilities, the point remains that farrowing pigs in the winter is much more difficult—and expensive.
People who didn't grow up on a farm may never fully appreciate the amount of work involved in raising a market animal, especially during the winter. The auctioneers are right to ask for more money, because if the entire story were to be told, people would be highly impressed by the dedication of today's 4-H'ers.