News

Report by Stephanie Bolte regarding students attending the Adelaide Show and participating in the SA Young Beef Breeders Schools Handler Competition.

Students Representing Tension Woods College include:
Stephanie Bolte (Year 9), Hamish Wilson (Year 9), Katherine Bolte (Year 7), Sarah Saggasser (Year 8) and Leah Wilson (Year 7)

We will be taking three cattle, two pure bred South Devon and one Hereford cross steer.
We are judged as a team and individually from the moment we arrive and we do not know who the judges are. We are judged on working together as a team, our care and handling of the cattle, our presentation, the presentation of the cattle and our animal husbandry including keeping our pen area clean and tidy.
We must always provide the correct feed and water. 
Each day starts very early to start preparing the steers for the ring. 
Every steer gets washed every morning by someone in our team. While that is happening the other team members will be cleaning our pens and cleaning out the bedding the cattle are in, so they lay in a clean area. 
This keeps them healthy and they get less dirty. 
The team work together to wash, blow dry, apply products to the animal so they look fantastic.
The steers get weighed and scanned when they arrive to Adelaide to get put in their classes. 
The days we are there the team is always checking that the cattle have enough hay in front of them and stay clean. 
One of the activities is leading the steers to parade for the judges to assess them. We must be presented immaculately alongside the steer. Before walking in the ring, the team make sure both the steer and leader are clean, ready and don’t need any final touches done. 

It is going to be a wonderful experience as it doesn’t matter what school you attend or what breed of cattle you bring to the show or that it is a competition, everyone is happy to help anyone out. We will meet so many people in the cattle industry and build lifelong friendships. After the show the steers are processed, we get the results from how the steers processed and this goes to our overall results so although we have a great time and get section results while we are attending the show we don’t get the final results until later. These are all skills that we can apply to agriculture from animal husbandry to being able to plan for profitable farming.