speaker-0: Welcome to the front. Today's episode: Confusing Judging Terms Part One. Let's get to it. To the Front, the show that answers questions for Stock Show families. Presented by TTF Nutrition, livestock supplements that get you to the front. It's gonna be a great day today. We're gonna talk about some confusing judging terms we've heard, and we've all heard ⁓ But I gotta start with this. Thomas, you have been wolfing down that ice cream. What is in that cup over there? What have you been sucking down?

speaker-1: You know, my wife brought me some Graters ice cream a few minutes ago. She knew that ⁓ I was looking a little thin, I think, is what she said. And she said, you know, you need some ice cream over here. So there was some sort of chocolate chip, something with peanut butter sauce on top. Kind of a ⁓ go to for me probably. If it's got peanut butter, I'm in. How how about you? If you went to Graters, what would you be ordering? Are you at the age where you'd go butter pecan yet, or is that still a few years out?

speaker-0: Man, I I didn't know butter pecan was an age related thing because I've been sucking down butter pecan ice cream since I was nine years old and we used to get it delivered in these like I don't know, it looked like a five gallon can to me from Schwanz. And the Schwanz man would come and he would drop off butter pecan ice cream and then every food item he had. We were so tight with our with our Schwanz man. When I was a little kid, my dad and I saw him out in the middle one day and he stopped and bought us lunch. 'Cause we were such good customers.

speaker-1: Gonna buy you lunch and then bring you lunch?

speaker-0: Absolutely. I was raised on Schwann's butter pecan ice cream.

speaker-1: No, I always think that it's like a grandpa thing 'cause it was old fashioned Butter Pecan is always the title I saw.

speaker-0: Right. I'm an old soul when it comes to ice cream, Thomas. I don't need any of that hippie newfangled stuff, you know. You bring me the classics. My wife's into coffee ice cream and I for the love of much as I love coffee, I can't get into coffee ice cream.

speaker-1: I mean I drink about four cups of coffee a day, probably not gonna pick up the coffee ice cream.

speaker-0: Do you have a I'm never eating this flavor of ice cream?

speaker-1: probably like a peach ice cream or something with fruit in there. It kinda throws me. I do if I'm feeling healthy, I eat like mint ice cream. I think it's green. It's a vegetable, so that's probably like a it's a healthy ice cream if I've got to choose one. I tell people it it fits into my diet 'cause I'm getting my veggies in for the day.

speaker-0: I do love some mint ice cream though. I'm a big fan of mint chocolate chip.

speaker-1: Yeah, that's good logic, right? I mean

speaker-0: Yeah, we might want to move on to another another ⁓ topic today, but we could talk ice cream all day.

speaker-1: Listen, if you see us at a show and you want to tell us about your favorite ice cream, these are the right two guys to come talk to. ⁓ you know, Tony, you mentioned being an old soul though, and I think ⁓ you know, being an old soul probably ⁓ doesn't always correlate with new judging.

speaker-0: No, it does not.

speaker-1: You've talked about millennial judging terms. I ⁓ I take that a little personally being a millennial myself over here.

speaker-0: Here there's a few things that I cannot stand and one of ⁓ is the phrase piece of livestock and I just think nobody sa nobody over the age thirty five says that. Like you know. But there's a few of these coming in here that maybe aren't millennial terms, but we hear ⁓ all the time and I don't know that everybody quite knows what they mean.

speaker-1: Yeah. And that's why I loved it. People sent these in and we started looking at ⁓ like, yeah, I can totally see how that's confusing. First one that we had sent to us and the one that probably got the most likes or ⁓ you know, kind of the most response was the term fresh. So Tony, when you hear the word fresh, what do you think about?

speaker-0: I think about a variety of things. I mainly think about ⁓ in a ⁓ whether it be hogs or cattle or sheep and goats, I mainly think about animals that look kind of youthful and lively, if you will, and they've got a fresh presentation and a f and a little bit of presence when they hit the ring. And then I also think about it reluct relative to muscle shape. And I think those animals that have fresh muscle shape, and it's a big term now, excuse me that we talk about in hogs all the time is he's got a big fresh back. And I just think about really crisp and youthful looking shape, ⁓ when I talk about it in terms of a muscle. But mainly I'm just thinking like youthful and the right kind of presence, upheaded, clean and crisp in their hair coat and their presentation or their fit job if it's cattle. And then when it comes to muscle, like that right kind of bloom and roll that they typically have when they're kinda on the way up, not necessarily on the way down. What is what What do you think of when you think fresh?

speaker-1: Yeah, I think I think the muscle like you talked about, and I think it's the appropriate amount of fat cover, right? So we're gonna talk about another term here in a few minutes being green, right? I think it's not l too little of a fat cover. It's not getting ⁓ you know, husky and and over the hill on fat cover. It's the appropriate amount of fat cover, the appropriate amount of muscle for the size that they are. I think that's a good way to think about it. Skin and hair plays a big deal into this though. ⁓

speaker-0: Absolutely. If they don't come in, and it doesn't matter to me the species, and I don't judge a lot of shows anymore, but I've judged my share. And man, when they hit the ring, the fresh ones, before you see muscle, before you even really evaluate fat cover or ⁓ anything that way, I think the fresh ones to me are really bright and and very lively almost in the way they're presented. Right. So white hogs that are white, black hogs that are black. hair kind of put together in the right manner. And same thing on the cattle side in particular, like a really clean, crisp hair coat with a good clip, fresh clip job and fit job and those things that just look really sharp in their appearance. And man, you run one of those to me, I and you're you're my friend right off the bat, right? Just br make ⁓ look cool and I'm in every time.

speaker-1: Those first impressions are so important, right? You know, when you're looking at three hundred and fifty hogs for the day, that first two or three seconds matters a bunch. And a fresh skin and hair coat, right skin and hair coat with fresh muscle pattern, fresh fat cover is awesome, I think. And and I think that's kind of what that judge is normally talking about. Next two terms that we have are kind of I'm gonna call ⁓ different sides of the same coin, but let's start with Green and then the other side of this is gonna be what we might call past their prime. So let's start with a green animal. When you think of a green animal, what what does that mean?

speaker-0: Green to me is going to mean a couple of different things. One, they're still really skinny and they're not where they need to be from a fat cover standpoint or a bloom standpoint. ⁓ so much of how we feed livestock of every species is getting the appropriate amount of fat on them at the right time and kind of keeping that freshness and that little bit of chub you need. And when I think of green, my first thought is they're still really skinny and hard in the way that they're put together. And you think about those baby pigs that you can count ribs on. Or those calves, right? That you can see every rib still. They just don't have enough bloom and and chub to them yet. And I could think that really green. The other thing is we hear about it a lot on the in the baby pig world that he's really green in his muscle. And that just means to me it's it's not there yet, right? He's kind of immature in the way that he's put together. And so the when I hear green, I think like hard and immature, and just not where they need to be yet. Maybe they're maybe it's appropriate. These things should be green for a some period of their life, but just not where they where they could be ⁓ from a muscle standpoint or a fat cover standpoint. What's your thoughts?

speaker-1: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think that green can be a good term up until a point. I think I always like to buy ⁓ green. I like to buy ⁓ a little skinny. Once they start hitting that middle growing phase, and if we're gonna talk show pigs, they start getting to be a hundred and fifty, hundred and seventy-five pounds, and we start calling ⁓ green after that, I think green's no longer a positive tournament at that point in time. So I think green early on means they have future, they have potential. Green as we're getting later in the growing stage means They're still not getting fat enough, their muscles still not developing enough. They still look really immature for a heavier weight animal. That's probably not a good thing at that point in time. Means we either need to feed really hard for a little while, or we need to change some management things up, maybe, or maybe unfortunately genetically, that one just isn't ever gonna get to be enough. So depending on where you are in the phase, green is either really good or it's a warning sign to say we need to change some things up. But I think if you're called green At your first jackpot show. To me that's not a warning flag. That's a you know what, as long as everything's in check and we know what our target show is, that doesn't bother me. Starts to bother me when we start to get the heavier weights if we got green ones.

speaker-0: Yeah, back twenty years ago I was standing watching the the open heifer show at the Indiana State Fair, ⁓ with a friend of mine who's big, big time in the shorthorn world, a guy I went to college with, and a judge was calling fourteen hundred pound mature heifers, well, this one's greener and he leaned over to me and said, At some point green becomes hard doing right? And that's kind of what you're describing, like They can't be green their whole life. That just means they're hard bodied and they're hard doing. So at some point we gotta get away from being green. ⁓ but being green for a while is not a bad thing.

speaker-1: What about ⁓ kind of what I'd call the other side of that coin being past their prime? You know, when you see one that's past their prime, you know, I think we start with the indicators being their skull maybe looks old, ⁓ they look like an animal that's old, but I think either that that's gonna mean that they're way too chubby and way too fat and got way too fat for their age, or their muscles may be way too hard and they're way too old to have really hard muscle. Or maybe they've just gotten too big to be a ⁓ quality market animal at that point in time. But what do you think about when somebody says that one's past their prime?

speaker-0: Well, this is this might be terribly inappropriate, but I think I'm old enough that I'm gonna have my thirtieth high school class reunion this year, right? I'm gonna have been out of high school thirty years. When I think of past their prime, I think about some people I went to high school with that man, they were amazing when they were seventeen or eighteen, and they ain't so amazing at forty eight, right? Like they had their moment, today ain't it, right? And that's kind of what I think about when I when we talk about livestock. These things probably had their moment ⁓ but that moment was a while ago. So I think about like typically those are animals that are we've probably pushed too hard and they're and they're getting chubby, right? They're gonna put in fat. There's fat that won't come off of ⁓ They get an old looking head, they get coarser in their joints, coints coarser in their bone work. They just really begin to show the wear and tear of however old they are and kind of what they've been through in their life. I think it

speaker-1: even shows up and we kind of talked about freshness earlier. Shows up in their skin and their hair coat too as well, right? And maybe they're looking a little dingy. So I think we've kind of talked about a spectrum of ⁓ We've got green kind of on the ⁓ er you know, less mature side. We've got fresh is kind of the ideal middle spot. And then we've got the past their prime kinda on the other side is kind of a way to think about that continuum of growing those livestock. Excellent. Got a few structure questions sent to us here and I think this is one that we talk about a lot. ⁓ you know, one that funnels at the ground. And so what when th when a judge says this one funnels at the ground, what are they referring to?

speaker-0: So I always think about this relative to base width. Okay, so if they funnel at the ground, either coming to you or going away, it's either they are wider in their chest than what their front feet hit when they're at the ground, or wider at their hip and stifle than what their front what their back feet are when they hit the ground. So they literally funnel as they go to the ground, right? They are narrower based than what they should be based on how their chest or their hip width reads. Right. ⁓ and it's not always, you know, when I was coming up and judging livestock in high school and college, we'd always talk about part of what pushes their her legs apart is muscle. And there's some truth to that, right? Typically animals that funnel at the ground, particularly behind, lack muscle down low in their ham or their quarter or their leg. But it's not always that. Sometimes it's just how they're built. But I think about funneling at the ground, meaning they're wider up high where that leg starts than it is when that leg finally hits the ground.

speaker-1: And if we if we get behind one and we draw the perfect picture, we'd say from the top of their hip to where their foot strikes the ground creates a straight line ⁓ you know from behind. Now we want some angle to their leg from the side, but from directly behind, we'd love to be able to draw a straight line up and down on both of those legs, right? The hock square, or what you might call inside their body, that it's inside that hip and foot, and everything kind of lines up. Same thing coming directly at you, ideally. From their blade all the way down to the ground, everything's straight up and down. When it's not, we've got what you might call some sort of structural ⁓ integrity that's that's been lost there to some extent. Now, I'd say one that funnels to the ground from behind is probably more of a fault in my mind than one that funnels to the ground coming at you a little bit. ⁓ but that might be personal preference. I've seen ⁓ you know, probably more of them get used that funnel Coming ⁓ at the ground, coming right at you, then funnel when going directly away from you, but a little bit of this and that, I suppose.

speaker-0: Yeah, I think it it's important to know, like, when you talk about that straight line, you gotta think about where that leg actually lines up on their body, right? And so an animal, a pig in this case, where their hip is and where that leg's gonna join their hip up high, isn't all the way out here at the very edge of their body, right? It's within, you know, you've got hair, you've got skin, you've got a fat layer, you got muscular layer, and so you know, within that framework of the outline of their body, that actual leg's gonna start. And from that point, that straight line and kind of being square. I always think about this. If you think about our legs or livestock legs, they're bent to flex in one direction. Right. So think about the hawk of your sh of your show pig. It's meant to flex forward and back. It's not meant to flex side to side. So if you get those things and they're not able to stay in line where they flex the right way, you've probably got something bad going on, right? Likewise in the front, that column of bone is meant to line up and then all the joints allow it to flex and move forward and back. And if it's not lining up, yeah, something ⁓ there's something up there.

speaker-1: Yeah, and I would say some of this can be fixed with a feed bucket and some of it cannot, right? And a lot of it is just genetically, that's what that animal is. Hey, next you get a little bit better at picking one out that is that is ⁓ square leaving you or square coming to you that doesn't funnel at the ground maybe quite as much.

speaker-0: Yeah, and certain breeds, ⁓ especially you talk on the pigs, are worse about this than others and like we've got a spot pig that I think's really, really good, right? And the one bad problem he has is he is narrower base behind than he should be relative to the width of his hip he funnels. And if you look at a lot if you watch a lot of spot barrows or spot pigs in general, they kinda do that right as a breed. And so sometimes it's a a genetic thing. Sometimes it is something you can affect with a feed bucket, particularly if they're too narrow and you're holding them and the animal's kind of sucked up all the time. Well then they're gonna get narrower in the way that they handle their leg. And as you feed on them, you know, you get them too wide. ⁓ sometimes you either widen them out or you get them too wide, depending on what you do. But ⁓ you know, there is some feed component, but oftentimes it's kind of a structural issue with the way that skeleton's lined up.

speaker-1: Kind of along the same lines, ⁓ you know, somebody said that the judge said that the one ahead of them was truer coming and going. What what does it mean to be truer coming and going?

speaker-0: To me, exactly like what we were talking about, right? I mean, you think about the way that that skeleton is designed to work, right? And those legs move forward and back in line with the body as they, you know, the the medical term would be ambulate, right, around the ring. They're not meant to go deviate sideways. So anytime we see that deviation, that's probably caused by some type of a structural issue or Sometimes it's temporary if you get one too full and they get wide. But that's what they mean is they are square or truer in the way their legs walk or work as they come to them or go away. So they're square at the ground, they're square in the way they attach up height of their body, and you see this kind of squareness to them as you go, or they're just truer in the way they sit down. The opposite of that would be either one that funnels at the ground. Right, like we just talked about, they're narrower at the bottom than they are at the top. Or rarely would you ever see this, but you see it on particularly on pigs and their hawks. Sometimes they get wider and they get too wide versus where that attaches up high. And those pigs kind of get outside of themselves, outside of the framework of the body and the way their legs attach. And ⁓ you know, that's one of those things. Some of ⁓ are just kind of built that way. ⁓ we've got bar we've had barrows, we don't have one this year, but we had a really cool one. a couple of years ago and we always said he he walks like he's on his way to a gunfight, right? If you think about he looks like he's headed to the OK Corral all the time, right? 'Cause his hawk would bow out and he would just kind of roll in there like he's fixing to you know go guns on you. ⁓ and that's kind of the opposite of funneling at the ground. He bowed at the ground. ⁓ but that's what truer means. It's just everything stays in line.

speaker-1: I think that's perfect. I think the only other confusing part of that term, if we say truer coming and going, I guess coming is just probably the front end and going is when they turn and walk away from you, kind of that back half, right? And so it's truer coming and going, meaning that they are truer on both ends of their skeleton. And that really the width that they have in their chest matches the width that they have from behind. So there are some that are narrow chested that Probably don't even funnel. They're just narrow chested all the way through. But man, maybe they're really wide out back. Hey, we've got one that doesn't ⁓ balance and match at that point in time and they're they're not true all the way through. One that's true coming and going probably means they have the appropriate amount of chest width and the appropriate amount of width kind of directly from behind. The fifth and final term that we have for part one and ⁓ guys I'll tell ya if you've got more that are confusing judging terms that you heard, send them to us and we'd love to talk about ⁓ But the fifth one that we have here is one that is flat caged. So when they say their cage is flat, what are they talking about?

speaker-0: Cage is something probably this is getting on the verge of one of those millennial terms. We didn't talk about cage, okay, when I was coming up and and judging at Oklahoma State, but we're talking about their rib cage, right? They're the way that their rib is set. And if you think about animals, and it doesn't matter what species that you've seen have a great big back, right? A huge muscular top. You have to have something to lay that muscle onto, right? And so ⁓ if you think about your T-bone steak, right, you've got that T at the top is a cross section of the spine, and then that that bone that comes out is the rib. And so that needs to sit in there in a great big arc, right? And so you got this outward curvature to the rib as it comes out of the top of their spine. And typically those animals then lay a lot of muscle right on top of that, and that's when you see those great big butterfly-shaped backs on those show pigs. That is so cool and everybody wants, but it's because of that huge ⁓ turn they have coming out of the top side of their skeleton, right out of their spine, right? So if they're flatter there, just think about instead of coming out and turning in a big bow, they just come out flatter, right? And so those animals look flatter in their side. A lot of times these are deeper in their side, but their rib sits more this way out of their spine instead of this way out of their spine. And that's what a judge would mean by flat caged. If you're in the cattle world, I always think about like Angus cattle are flatter in their rib shape, typically, right? And so you think about Angus get flatter this way, but get really deep, right? And they got that really cool look from the side, but they're typically flatter, more angular in the way their rib comes together. And then think about a big muscular show steer that looks like he's seven miles wide, his rib's gonna come out way up high with a lot of shape and bow. Right? So that's what a judge means by flatter in their cage. back in my day, if you're my age, you used to talk about hey, has more rib shape, he's got more turn to his rib, he's got more outward spring to his rib. All those terms mean the same thing, that they've got a rounder body or a rounder cage.

speaker-1: kind of look right behind their blade, kind of right behind that front leg. It's kind of the place to look for that. And I I always think, does it look like he's got a five gallon bucket inside of them? Or does it look like he was made out of two by fours, you know, and kind of we constructed him that way is kind of the way that I would think about that, right? And so when we're looking right behind that front leg there, is their rib round? Do they look like they've got a five gallon bucket inside of them? That's a rounder ribbed one. To your point, like you said earlier, you know, we show some goats, right? And so they want them to be round ribbed, but they also want ⁓ to be shallower chested, right? And so to your point, when they're rounder ribbed, they can be a little shallower chested. When they're flat sided, they tend to get deeper in their side, right? And their their chest tends to be a little bit lower. The round ribs ones seem to be tucked up a little bit more and have a little bit more round body shape, and as you said, often have a bigger back that goes with it.

speaker-0: It's foundation that you lay all that muscle on up high, right? And in every species you have anymore, we talk about big backs in every single market species we have and most of the breeding stock as well. And if they don't have that round rib to lay that muscle on, they're just not going to look big backed, right? They just don't have that. So ⁓ it's one of those things we've been talking about for a long time. Somebody just got creative one day and started talking about their cage, and now it's the trendy term to say.

speaker-1: You do that really well. Could you do that again?

speaker-0: Yeah, I'm big on being trendy. ⁓ if you talk all those terms that we used to talk about, those all mean the exact same thing. It's just that shape, that arch to the rib as it comes high out of their spine. And you know, typically those animals that have that, Thomas, and you know this, typically if they're gonna come out of their back the right way, they're also gonna be kind of bold and wide in their chest, right? They're gonna have some width between their shoulder blades. Very rarely do you have an animal that's only wide in one spot, right? ⁓ we've had a few pigs that weren't very good that we said were were shaped like a canoe, right? The whitest spot of ⁓ was the middle of their back 'cause they were narrow chested and didn't have any butt. But that's not a good thing. Typically those animals with that round body shape, they're wide in their chest, they've got the right kind of rib blade in ⁓ they've got the right kind of hip width. Typically in livestock things match. ⁓ every now and then you find freaky ones that don't, but for the most part, those kind of things tend to roll together.

speaker-1: Hopefully that's helpful guys as we've gone through those terms. Like I said, shoot us the other ones that come to mind for you. ⁓ be sure to give us a like and a and a subscribe on either Apple Podcast or on Spotify. We look forward to seeing you at a show sometime over this summer and ⁓ look forward to hearing from you.

speaker-0: Front baby. To the front has been brought to you by TTF Nutrition. Livestock supplements that get you to the front. Learn more at ttfnutrition.com.