Ag Tour in Texas!

Howdy!

It is great for the team and myself to be in the great Lone Star State of Texas, my home! We are in Texas for the week to tour many different branches of the agricultural industry. This week is going to be jam packed of feedlots, rodeos, and museums. We flew into Amarillo, TX on Saturday and walked off the plane to clear skies, and warm weather!

The trip began with dinner at the Big Texan, a popular restaurant in Amarillo where if you think you are brave enough, you can try to eat a 72 oz. steak! If you complete the steak then you get it for free, but if you don't then you have to pay for it.

We were joined by people who work with Consolidated Beef, a company who markets cattle after the feedlot, Micro-Beef Industries, a company who makes the electronic I.D. tags for beef cattle!
It was great for me to see some old friends and catch up on old times.

This morning(Sunday), we got up and had breakfast at the Waffle House, another version of Denny's or IHOP. Then headed to Cal Farley's Boys Ranch. Boys Ranch is a town, where students can go and live, and the town is basically the school. The students live, work, and study here. It was amazing to see how agricultural education at this school system has turned around the lives of many students.

After leaving Boys Ranch we headed back toward Amarillo, and stopped at the Cadillac Ranch. Many Many years ago, a man in Amarillo bought a bunch of Cadillacs, and buried them halfway in the ground. Everyone can stop and spray paint their name on the cars! It was really neat to look and see many of the different names that people had painted on the cars.

After leaving Amarillo we headed to a feedlot with Cactus Feeders. Cactus Feeders is the largest privately owned feedlot in the world! They have many locations, and through this one that we had we saw over 45,000 head of cattle! That's a lot of beef! We spent time seeing their feed mill, and talking about some issues in the animal industry, and we drove around and looked at some cattle.

We are now in Lubbock, the cotton capitol of the world, and home of my home university the Texas Tech! It is great to be back and see some fellow Red Raiders. We will be making some visits around Lubbock tomorrow! It looks like it is going to be a fun week. Tomorrow we will be making a stop at CEV Multimedia, which is a curriculum development company for many career and technical education programs, including agricultural education. It looks like it is going to be an awesome week.

Take Care,

Riley Branch