the Fall sale. To the Harker family from Indiana, thank you for breeding this amazing female and I am proud to get to call you friends now. This has been quite the adventure with this outstanding creature! Also a shout out to Kinnick Paulsen, Drew Jacobsen, Dalton Hartman, Nick Deppe and Keegan Mather who all came together as a team to get my heifer dressed. We could not have done it without you. We spent 7 amazing days at the Iowa State Fair. On the last day, loading up to go home, the tears just started flowing again. I didn’t want the week to end. I came away with Supreme heifer, Champion Showmen and Grand Champion Foundation Simmental Female in open class but also made life long memories with family and friends that I will never forget. •
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Iowa State Fair
Karen is special. She will always hold a special place for our family and on our farm. She has been frustrating at times though due to her attitude but we have worked through it. She is smart and knows her routine and really doesn’t like new people or fast movements. I do want to apologize to the judges and ring help that she has kicked. Being in our barn, working on my heifer, with my brother since last October has been the best. We knew we had a competitive heifer and we had to set goals and make tough decisions as far as what shows we wanted to take her out to earlier
on knowing that State Fair was our priority and biggest dream. I can’t thank my brother, Colin, enough for all of the help in the barn getting Karen to look the best she could and we can definitely say all of the early mornings, late nights and everything in between working hair, exercising and practicing showmanship paid off. Colin has always been one of my big supporters and mentors. I can easily say I have learned a lot from him and he drives me to be better. Saying just thank you to my parents is not enough. They make everything possible and support us in everything we do. Dad got his exercise in every
morning with Karen as she would run the best for him and he has always taken care of our feeding program telling me what to feed. Mom is the go to, if I need extra help in the barn she is there, she gets us where we need to be and handles all of the paperwork and deadlines that the rest of us would probably forget. I wouldn’t trade our barn and all of the countless hours spent with family in that barn for anything. I would also like to thank Jeff Paulsen and his family and crew for all of the help and support along the way and just being a friend and mentor. We purchased this heifer off of Jeff ’s Divas of
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