Garden City, Kan. — I should get out more.
How else do you explain my having spent three decades as a higher-education reporter without knowing that intercollegiate meat-judging competitions have taken place for years? And when students on Garden City Community College’s team tried to explain how the judging works, they found me clueless about even the basics of meat science.
“We judge beef, pork, and lamb carcasses,” said the team’s coach, Clint Alexander, who is also head of the college’s animal-science program. Grading involves evaluating the quality of the meat as well as calculating how much of it there is, relative to fat and bone. There’s a lot of math—a whole lot—but students also have to be good note-takers and be able to analyze what they see quickly, preferably producing reliable scores time after time.
Many of the students on the meats team have strong connections to agriculture, having grown up on or around farms or ranches and having been members of the Future Farmers of America. Mr. Alexander takes competition as seriously as any football coach—"We’ve won lambs five out of the last nine competitions,” he said—and he has recruited team members from as far away as California’s Central Valley. He let me leaf through the team handbook, which is as valuable to members as any Division I team’s playbook, but the pages and pages of charts and tips might as well have been written in Sanskrit for all they meant to me.
The key to judging meat well, Mr. Alexander said, is practicing, and for that, “you have to go to the animals.” That may mean a team trip to Iowa to practice on pork or lamb—team members have matching equipment bags with their names stitched on the sides, and victories are recorded inside the door of the team’s bright-yellow trailer—but the team practices most often at a 3,100-employee Tyson Foods facility just outside of Garden City. Tyson officials will “give us a rail and rail out whatever we want to practice on,” Mr. Alexander said.
I had no idea what he was talking about until he and some team members took me across Garden City to the Ehresman Packing Company’s small plant, where students also practice sometimes. Mr. Alexander and his students put on white coats and hard hats and led me into the refrigerated storage rooms, where beef and pork carcasses hung from an overhead rail system designed to allow the carcasses to be moved around fairly easily. Then I understood: “Give us a rail” meant the students would have a rail of their own to work at, and “rail out whatever we want” meant the kinds of carcasses the students needed to practice on would be brought over to their rail.
Mr. Alexander conducted a quick team tutorial with a goat carcass he found hanging at the end of one rail—"Goats are our new thing,” one student said—and then he cut into a beef carcass to show me what kinds of cuts students would be presented with in competitions, which take place about a half-dozen times a year in conjunction with major livestock events in Denver, Houston, Fort Worth, and elsewhere. The heifer he and the students were looking at had been small, but after a few minutes Mr. Alexander pronounced the meat choice. “You’d find this in a steakhouse,” he said.
The students told me they enjoyed being on the team for the camaraderie, especially on team trips, but many of them also expect to work in the meat industry someday, and the meat-judging team is a great way to gain experience. “Five of the eight graders at the Tyson plant,” Mr. Alexander says, “graded for me at one point.”
