SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Mike Albiani has been around Elk Grove High School’s farm for decades as a teacher and Future Farmers of America adviser. One thing he knows come auction time: Sometimes, there are tears.
This year, the animals’ procession from farm project to auction floor, slaughterhouse to table — and the emotional bonds students build with them in the months leading to auction — has taken on renewed importance following the Shasta County saga of Cedar the goat.
First reported by The Sacramento Bee, a legal battle arose from the goat’s seizure by Shasta County law enforcement at the behest of county fair officials and its apparent eventual slaughter after its 9-year-old owner and family backed out of the animal’s sale. The family has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit, which shows the efforts officials went to to retrieve the goat. The case, the issue and the details about it have generated a range of social reaction and gone viral.
But it also has focused new attention on programs like 4-H and FFA.
The kids in the Future Farmers of America program on the Elk Grove campus are getting ready for another fair season and Albiani is preparing them for the day their animals head to the auction block. Elk Grove High School’s FFA is one of the region’s largest at 500 students. Albiani is one of seven advisers and has been at the job for more than 30 years at the school.
“There are tears, but the tears are short-lived,” Albiani said recently. “We talk about that all through the process. It starts early at the parent meetings. As long as you reinforce that this is the purpose of the animal — if you reinforce that, and your peers give you support, it’s OK.”
The process — raising chickens and turkeys, goats, sheep, hogs and cattle over the space of three months or longer to be sold for meat — carries the lexicon of the auction: “processed;” “supply,” “end product,” “terminal sale.”
Students spend their mornings before class and afternoons after feeding and caring for their goats, sheep and hogs, mucking stalls, sweeping pens, many learning farm life from the inside, for the first time.
‘But the inevitability?’
Elk Grove students who talked with the Bee on last week appeared clear-eyed about the assignment — and its end goal, the Sacramento County Fair’s terminal sale in late June.
Colton Amhiehl, 15, is in his first year of the program, raising a lamb named Bandit for the black marking over its eyes.
“It’s a great experience to see them grow — and see them sell. You feed them, interact with them. The interaction’s really fun. There’s always something new,” Colton said, sweeping out pens over the loud bleating of goats and sheep.
“But the inevitability? When you buy them, that’s what you expect,” he continued. “It is heartbreaking at times, but you know you did the best you could for him and you get a good feeling knowing that someone will buy it and put food on the table.”
This week, April 15, the Elk Grove FFA students will have a group practice, running themselves and their animals through the paces in a simulated auction.
“We’re making sure we’re being very clear with our exhibitors. We’re spending a lot of time with them,” said Jordan Albiani, a teacher and FFA adviser at nearby Galt High School, and daughter of Elk Grove High’s Mike Albiani, visiting her father’s program on Thursday.
“Our kids, they understand the end goal, but also valuing the care of their livestock,” she said. “Every kid is different, but making sure the messaging is the same is important.”
Parental involvement, choices
That goes for parents, too, Mike Albiani said last week outside the farm’s goat and sheep pens. A day earlier, a mother of one student toured the pens. “She said, ‘These are really going to be meat?’” Albiani said. ‘That’s the purpose. It’s a market. The end result is, you’re selling that as a meat animal. It’s going to be part of the food supply.”
There are offramps, however, to the terminal sale. Students can opt for breeding projects, raising rabbits or egg laying hens that aren’t headed for the meat market.
Last year two students had goats and didn’t want them to be processed. One of the students’ parents and grandparents bought the goats for their farm: “They were willing to let them be lawnmowers,” Albiani said. Other times, “We will help work with students in advance. If you don’t want the animal to be processed, you have to pull it out of the sale.”
Maddison Machado, a 17-year-old junior from Elk Grove, wears rubber boots flecked with straw and muck, standing next to the hog pens that carry her year’s entry and dozens of others. That’s No. 2915 dozing fitfully in the straw as a bunkmate bumps and jostles him. “He sees me, he goes straight to the pen,” she said. “They’re really smart.”
This year is Machado’s second in the program, though she’s a relative livestock rookie.
“My family grew up around livestock. I grew up in Laguna West,” she said. “It’s something I never thought I’d do, but it’s taught me a lot of patience.”
When the time comes for the county fair, “Of course, it’s going to be somewhat sad — there’s an emotional connection with the animal,” Machado said. “But I went into this knowing what was going to happen. It’s a project — not to objectify the animal — but you don’t minimize the treatment of the animal. You have to put in effort to make it the best it can be, to make its life have value in the time that we have it.”
