We'll review everything in the first couple of weeks and hopefully, we'll be prepared for the first contest. The team's travel expenses will be sponsored by Southwest Dairy Museum. The museum also partners with NMSU's Cooperative Extension Service on the Kids, Cows and More project, a program designed to teach urban children about agriculture. Covey and Looper are already recruiting members for the judging team, which will be made up of students in Covey's spring and fall dairy cattle evaluation classes. They just need to have an interest in dairy judging.
Covey plans to start out with the basics.
The students will learn to provide oral reasons in judging, and then we'll visit area dairies to practice judging. Then we'll progress to the real contests. Covey is no novice at starting a dairy judging team from the ground up. As a student at Oklahoma State University, where he received a bachelor's degree in agricultural communications, he helped revive a judging team which had been defunct for several years. Covey and his younger sister, Amy, were both founding members of the new team.