Fun With 4-H

Fun+With+4-H

Mattie Goad

4-H is a program for kids to learn about agriculture and life skills. There are many different contests and competitions to compete such as judging animals, cooking different meats, making life decisions, or something as simple as making a poster. Sadly this year most of the contests have been canceled or moved to virtual, so this year, the kids won’t get the same experience.

These competitions will help with different jobs that you may do in the future. One of the most important ones is land judging because when you build a house you have to test the soil to make sure that over time your house won’t sink or move.

Meat ID is where you get shown a picture of a certain piece of meat and you have to decide what cut it is, what animal it came from, and how it is normally cooked. This could be helpful in everyday life. For example, if you’re going to Walmart to buy meat for a cookout, you might need to know what cut of meat your getting or how good of a piece it is.

In life skills competitions, you choose the best option for the situation, some of it is food where you are given a situation such as someone with diabetes or a eating disorder and you have to pick the best option for them.

My favorite competition was meat cookery. In this competition, you choose either pork, lamb, steak, or chicken, and you grill it and use different recipes (you also get to taste your meat for practice). I placed 3rd in this competition, and I cooked chicken. There are many other categories to compete in other than the ones that I named.

You could raise and show animals such as lambs, goats, cows, pigs, and chickens. Your animals gets judged on how well you feed it and how well its overall condition is. You can even earn money after the show if your animal is placed high enough and if someone wants to buy your animal from you.

Another benefit in doing 4-H is that in the future, it could give you a chance to earn scholarship money. You can do community service to help your earn more scholarship money. Even if you don’t get any benefit out of doing service it makes you feel good knowing that you helped out your community even if you don’t personally know the people who you helped.

Many people don’t like 4-H or just don’t care about doing the work, but 4-H is a very important and fun thing to do after school with so many events to help you in the future.