A strong work ethic helps us focus on our livestock chores along with schoolwork and sports.
This is Warren and Eli Schweitzer responding to this question as we now are back in school.
We are farm boys that raise livestock as 4-H projects. We also play football, basketball, and baseball. It is hard to balance sports and livestock, especially with going back to school.
Before we went back to school, instead of going to class, we were going out to the barn every day to walk our animals, clean them, clean pens, and do other things with the livestock. We did all of those things to get ready for the 4-H fair at the end of the summer.
When we went back to school, we had fewer animals because we took some of our pigs and cattle to market for meat. Even though there is less livestock on our farm we still do chores everyday both in the morning, before school, and at night, after school.
On the weekends, working around games and practices, we clean pens, wash the livestock, and walk the animals.
When we get home late from a sports game if we haven’t done chores yet we can’t just skip doing chores. Our animals need us! We still have to go out and take care of the animals.
We always have to make sure we find time at night for chores because we have to balance time between homework, farm work, and practice. It’s our responsibility to make sure our animals have a clean pen, food, and water.
In the morning we wake up around six because we have to do chores, eat breakfast, and be ready to go to school by 7:20 so as you can imagine some days can turn into late nights and early mornings.
Livestock is a lot of work, to take care of our animals, but it is still fun to raise them and show them at the fair.
Warren & Eli Schweitzer