There’s nothing like the smell of warm hay and wet pig
mid-morning. For 33 Sobrato High School students, it’s just part of
the daily upkeep of their show animals
– pigs, lambs and goats – in preparation for the Santa Clara
County Fair in August.
There’s nothing like the smell of warm hay and wet pig mid-morning. For 33 Sobrato High School students, it’s just part of the daily upkeep of their show animals – pigs, lambs and goats – in preparation for the Santa Clara County Fair in August.
On Wednesday, agriculture teacher Joe Martin crouched in the designated pig walking pen as students used plastic prods to keep the 300-pound porkers in line.
Sobrato’s Future Farmers of America president McKenna Miles walked her pig Frank; Martin explained the process.
“She’s trying to show off the best qualities to the judge. They will walk with the pig to show the side profile, the front rear profile. You want to show all cuts of meat, how the animal moves, their muscle characteristics. Like the butt, because that’s going to be your ham and over the top is going to be your loin,” Martin said.
McKenna is showing Frank and her lamb Steve at the fair that begins Aug. 4 and runs through Aug. 7. Her goal is to attend Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and study communications and agriculture science to combine her love of public speaking and agriculture.
“It’s a lot of work,” she said a split-second before Steve yanked her toward the feed. Miles, who will be a junior this fall, smiled and didn’t hesitate to complete her thought. “I’m having so much fun,” she said.
Nearby, with a firm hand underneath Buddy the lamb’s chin and her other hand on his head, soon-to-be sophomore Heather Sjostedt practices keeping her show lamb steady while assistant vice principal Vera Gomes and former Live Oak ag teacher critiques the approach.
“You went from an average lamb, to an awesome lamb,” Gomes said. Behind Buddy, rambunctious Steve pranced away again.
“You owe me an ice cream! You better catch that lamb!” Gomes is volunteering time this summer to help with the lambs. “These kids are spending five to six hours a day out here. They’re dedicated to it.”
Miles and Sjostedt took turns walking the lambs around the dirt patch outside the barn.
“With lambs, you can take an average lamb and be an excellent showman and win the show. Then take an excellent lamb with a crappy showman, you would lose the show,” Gomes said just outside the Sobrato barn under the summer sun of 11:30 a.m. Wednesday. “So (with) lambs it’s how you would display the animal. That is why it’s so challenging to show.”
Sjostedt and the other 32 students are giving a portion of their summer vacation to take the Regional Occupation Program “agriculture sales and science.” The rest of Sobrato’s campus is deserted with intermittent “baaing” from any of the seven lambs in the barn. Sobrato students will show six pigs from the March offspring of Sobrato’s prized hog Big Mama; two of the giant 4-month-old piglets flopped onto the cool cement in the barn as a student sprayed them with hose water. “Pigs don’t sweat. So they need to cool off by interaction with the wet ground or each other. That’s why we can’t walk them for very long in the sun,” Martin said. He’s switching off with teachers Tanya Salo and department chair Myndi Krafft to teach the summer course.
Twice a day, every day, Sobrato students feed their animals at the school’s nine-acre farm – just one of three school farms in Santa Clara County (the others are at Live Oak and Westmont High School in Campbell) – cleaning the pens of pigs, lambs and goats, grooming, feeding and preparing the animals. The money they make at the fair is theirs to keep.
“You have to have a lot of patience to do this,” Sjostedt said. “I just like hanging out with the animals and being outdoors, instead of being stuck in a city or something.”
