Baa-ck in the ring

Twenty-one years ago, Nick Nelson was a nervous 8-year-old when he walked his lamb into the ring at the Douglas County Lamb Show. Waiting in the ring was a judge who was going to determine how well the fourth-grader had raised his animal.

Nelson doesn’t remember the results of that morning judging, just that he had the jitters.

Fast forward to last Saturday morning and Nelson was again nervous as he entered the same ring for the 68th annual Douglas County Lamb Show.

This time the 29-year-old was the judge. He spent the morning in the barn at the Douglas County Fairgrounds, judging the conformation of almost 200 lambs that were the 4-H and FFA projects of young owners.

He had returned to his roots and he knew the pressure was on. His job was to determine a grand champion lamb and a reserve champion (second-place) lamb. He was also to give blue ribbons to the best lambs and red ribbons to the lambs that could have used a little more work.

“There’s pressure to make the right decision because everybody knows me,” said Nelson late in the afternoon while sitting in a corner of the barn. “I know people would not be afraid to tell me if they disagreed with a decision. But I didn’t hear anything negative. Everything was positive.”

Several of the people in the barn Saturday called the young judge “Nicky.” They remembered him when he was a student at Oakland High School and showed lambs in the show for five years. Nelson said his best lamb during those years earned a second in its class.

Nick grew up in the sheep business as his parents, Veril and Barbie Nelson, had about 200 ewes during his preschool and grade school years. During his junior high school years, Nick took over caring for the flock as his dad shifted his focus to raising red Angus cattle and also had commitments as the Sutherlin High School agriculture science teacher and FFA adviser.

During those years, 4-H and FFA project lambs were purchased from the Nelson flock.

“I raised more lambs that finished better than mine did at the lamb show,” the younger Nelson said. “When I was a freshman or sophomore, there were six to eight lambs in the championship ring that were from our place.”

The 1996 Oakland High School graduate went on to school in California, at Lassen Junior College in Susanville and Chico State University, where he was on livestock judging teams that traveled to intercollegiate judging contests

While in Chico, he lived and worked on the university’s farm, where he became student manager of the swine unit and was responsible for bringing in new bloodlines to the unit. Pigs were new to Nelson.

“They made kids get out of their comfort zones and learn about other livestock,” he said.

Nelson graduated from Chico State in 2001 and enrolled at Oregon State University in January 2002 as a graduate student.

He entered the teaching profession as an animal science teacher at North Clackamas High School in Oregon City. In 2003, he took an ag teaching position at Hermiston and is now completing his fourth year at the north central Oregon high school of 1,300 students.

Nelson is one of three ag teachers at Hermiston where the school’s FFA club numbers 205 student members and its FFA alumni booster group is just over 100. Those groups are about the largest in the state, he said, adding that there are 546 students who took ag classes this school year with about 200 of them taking two different ag classes.

“That’s still a very agricultural area,” Nelson said. “The neatest thing about ag and FFA is you get to apply everything you teach through hands-on projects.”

Like his own folks, the younger Nelson and his wife, Chrissy, have livestock (red Angus) on their home place.

But last Saturday, Nick Nelson returned to his roots and the lamb industry.

“It’s good to have young people coming back into the industry to help replace the older ones who are bowing out,” said Denny Quinby, the ag teacher at Elkton High School.

“It’s really neat anytime you have local kids come back and do something like this where their roots are,” said Veril Nelson. “I’m really proud of him as a teacher and for his involvement in the livestock industry. He probably feels about ag the same as I do ... that it’s one of the most important industries that there is.”

Nick Nelson said making his decisions as a judge Saturday was difficult because there were so many lambs that were “well finished” by their young owners. He said the grand champion that he selected “was the heaviest muscled lamb with big rib eyes and the largest legs. It’s going to have a lot of (meat) product.”

When his day of judging was over, Nelson said it had been “fun.”

“It was a unique opportunity to come back home to my own local show,” he said.



• Features editor Craig Reed can be reached at 957-4210 or by e-mail at creed@newsreview.info.