The prize and price of raising Fresco
Kelly Tunney | Herald-Standard
Mikaela blow dries Fresco after washing him. Fresco’s wool coat, like a sweater, retains a lot of moisture after getting wet, so sheep farmers use industrial blowers specifically built for drying livestock.
Kelly Tunney | Herald-Standard
Mikaela and her friend Hunter Clay prep their lambs and practice their stance in the arena early on the morning of the judging. In several hours, the arena would fill and hundreds of lambs would file in, be judged, and advance either to auction later in the week or to immediate sale.
Kelly Tunney | Herald-Standard
Mikaela sets up Fresco after he is shorn so that Chris can take a photo of him and Mikaela.
Travis Stufflet, 10, lets his goat King Tut nibble on their 8th-place ribbon as they stand in the ring after being judged. Because only the winner and a few runners-up go to auction later in the week, Travis will have to give up King Tut immediately after leaving the arena to be sold at the market rate for goat meat.
Kelly Tunney | Herald-Standard
Chris Rerko goes in to shear the top of Fresco’s head on November 1. Rerko, as Mikaela’s 4-H Lamb Club leader and breeder, is more experienced with shearing and takes the lead on shearing the more sensitive areas on Fresco and Sanchez until Mikaela gets more experience.
Mikaela, Fresco and Sanchez mill around in the lambs’ pen as Mikaela prepares to feed the two. Keeping two lambs together helps them grow better because they keep each other calm and compete with each other for their food. They will eventually need to be separated at feeding time because one of the lambs typically becomes too dominant and crowds out the other.
Chris Rerko shows off lambs to the Kamp family as they pick up Fresco, Sanchez and Chili from the Rerkos’ Rostraver farm.
On Jan. 10, Mikaela Kamp and her lamb Fresco stand on the auction block awaiting judgment.
Mikaela spent months raising Fresco and his brother Sanchez from boisterous 50-pound lambs to mostly-behaved 160-pound lambs: feeding them before and after school, taking them on daily strolls around the farm, shampooing their wool and blowing them dry with a giant hairdryer.
Now the machine gun banter of the livestock auctioneer will decide how much a butcher will pay Mikaela for Fresco.
Since the beginning of September, Mikaela Kamp, 15, of Gibbon Glade has been raising Fresco and Sanchez as if they were her babies.
“I like the moment whenever you realize that your lamb knows who you are and nobody else,” she says. “If somebody else walks in the barn, they run away, and you’re like ‘Aww, they actually do like me!'”
Mikaela lets her 5-year-old sister Adria name her animals every year. So far she’s chosen Bay, Hillie, Tulla, Ziggy, Owen and, after the movie “Frozen” came out, named a pair of pigs Sven and Olaf.
Mikaela has raised lambs for the Fayette County Fair and has done well with her animals for the past three years. But for the high school sophomore, college on the horizon calls her to a bigger arena: The Pennsylvania Farm Show, where Mikaela could win a scholarship to help with tuition.
For the Farm Show, Mikaela has been raising lambs bred by her 4-H Lamb Club leader, Chris Rerko. On Sept. 2, she, her mom, and stepdad and her two sisters went to pick up the lambs from Chris and his wife Stephanie’s farm in Belle Vernon. Chris explains how to care for the lambs’ wool and passes along secrets from his own lamb showing days.
“It’s very exciting,” Chris says later, at the farm show. “I was very nervous, probably more nervous than she was. That’s an animal that I produced, and I helped her along the way.” Mikaela’s lambs will be Rerko’s first to be judged at a state level, and as a lamb breeder and 4-H Lamb Club leader, his work will be being judged as well.
Raising lambs for the Farm Show comes with a prize and a price.
The prize is that if Kamp’s lambs can compete against other lambs from all over the state, they’ll make it to the auction. And if Mikaela makes it to auction for three years in high school, she’ll be eligible to win substantial scholarships from 4-H for college.
Mikaela’s stepfather, Joel Obertance, pitches in when he’s home. For two weeks on, two weeks off, he flies helicopters for drilling operations around the country. Despite having grown up a “city slicker” in Ohio, he’s dived right into the farm life in Gibbon Glade and has been working alongside the rest of the family to prepare Fresco and Sanchez for show.
The price of the Farm Show is that it’s a much less profitable auction than a county fair, and no matter what, the lambs aren’t coming back home.
Mikaela’s first lamb, Bay, was sold to a petting farm: a dream buyer for a kid selling her first lamb. But that was an exception.
“They explained this. If you didn’t place, that was it. They’re gone,” Joel says. “The kids that have done it, they’re used to it. They kind of know what the end game is … it’s gonna be in the freezer somewhere, unfortunately.”
Lambs have to go to market sooner or later. Mikaela is hoping for later. At the Farm Show, the kids whose animals place well get to keep them until the livestock auction, where they could fetch several times market price. But if a lamb doesn’t make the cut, it’s the end of the road.
For kids like 10-year-old Travis Stufflet of Lenhartsville, it’s a brutal goodbye. His goat, King Tut, was a little too boisterous in the arena, knocked him down, and was quickly ranked near the bottom. In an instant, when Travis was put in eighth place, hopes for a ribbon turned into the realization that in a few minutes Travis would be leaving the barn alone and Tut would be bound for the butcher.
It’s a universal experience for 4-H kids.
“There’s a couple girls, when their lambs get taken, they’re just bawling, crying,” Joel says. “Because you put this time and effort into this animal, and for lack of better words, it becomes a pet. And then it’s gone. It goes to get butchered.”
Before Mikaela can think about saying goodbye, she has to focus on showing well for the judge. She only enters one lamb in the farm show, and Fresco is the better built of her pair. Her months of care — and Fresco’s entire life — come down to how they perform in the arena.
Mikaela has been rehearsing with Fresco for weeks so he is used to standing still for the judge. She has been growing out the wool on his legs so they will look fuller; she has adjusted his feed so that he will be leaner. He’s as fit as he’ll ever be on the inside and out. The rest is in the judge’s hands.
Watching Mikaela’s lambs be judged is nerve-wracking, says Joel. “I think there are some unfair moments where you think she’s done better than she actually did, but it’s up to the judge.”
“If your lamb jumped or anything, and he couldn’t touch it, you were automatically put in the last places. So whenever he came up and was ready to touch my lamb, I was thinking ‘You’d better not move. You can not move!'” Mikaela said.
Earlier in the day, Mikaela’s friend showed a lamb that bucked and wouldn’t let the judge feel him. Regardless of the quality of his lamb, it couldn’t be quickly judged and he was demoted out of eligibility for the auction. There are too many lambs at the Farm Show for any to get second chances.
When Mikaela’s group comes up, the judge watches the half dozen lambs and their farmers march into the arena. There are only six lambs in Fresco’s group, so instead of the four winning places originally announced, it turns out only the top three will progress to the auction.
The judge studies the lambs’ posture, build and gait. Mikaela has practiced her showmanship by training Fresco to stand still with her. Not every contestant has, and a jumpy 160-pound lamb can catch some air. But Mikaela and Fresco are flawless. One, two, three lambs are cut, leaving Mikaela and two others to be ranked as winners.
“He stood completely still for me. He did really well,” Mikaela says. Mikaela’s performance won Master Showman for her group, but the final decision came down to genetics. Fresco had a minor, unsightly ridge in the muscles on his back, and the judge thought the other lamb looked “fresher.” Fresco took second place, and Mikaela advanced to the auction.
Mikaela paid $300 for Fresco in September. Since then, she’s fed him twice a day, taken him out for a walk or a run every day and sheared him every month. “It’s a lot of money,” she says, but the Harrisburg crowd isn’t shelling out to support the kids like they do at the Fayette County Fair. “You don’t make your profit back.”
Raising livestock for show is a big investment, but grand champions can sell for many times the market cut rate. Early in the auction, a purebred champion lamb sold for over $1,000. When Mikaela and Fresco take the stage, Mikaela and Fresco assume the show position, forcing a smile for a crowd of buyers. The auctioneer starts at three-fifty and drops down to three hundred, where Fresco catches a bid and is sold. Mikaela rubs Fresco’s neck, and he is as calm for the auctioneer as he was for the judge. It takes 23 seconds from Mikaela and Fresco’s introduction to when she turns to walk off the stage, another lamb and another owner taking her place.
Mikaela doesn’t drag out the goodbye when she leaves him in the stock pen at the arena. While she raised Fresco and Sanchez, Mikaela would put the lambs on opposite ends of a field, she says. “It’ll run to the other lamb because it wants the other lamb. That’s the only way we can get them to run.” Now Fresco mills around with a dozen other lambs, standing up on his hind legs, peering around the crowded barn as people crowd past the cage.
Mikaela, back at her now-empty pen several rows away, packs up the feed and the shears and the blanket Fresco wore to keep his wool clean for the judge.
“They’re really hard to let go,” Mikaela says. “They’re kind of like my children. They know who you are, and when you walk in in the morning, if they know it’s not you, they’re not going to let you touch them or anything. And it’s just really nice to know they’re always kind of there.”
Mikaela met her goal: she entered the farm show for the first time, took second place and Master Showman, and got one year of eligibility toward a scholarship. But Fresco is waiting for a stock trailer, and Sanchez will be sold too after Mikaela gets home.
“I didn’t really cry, but then whenever I got home is when it hit me hard was when I realized I didn’t have anything to do in the barn anymore,” she says. “I tell myself that it’s just going to happen, there’s no way to change it, there’s no way I’m getting it back.” Fresco is gone, like Bay, Hillie, Tulla, Ziggy and Owen before him. But the Fayette County Fair rolls around every year, and Chris and Stephanie’s ewes just had a new fall of lambs.