Any Greene County 4-H’er that wants to show livestock but may not have the financial means, space or know how to do so can sign up for a certain project area.

Greene County Extension 4-H and Youth Coordinator Samantha Hardaway says the deadline to register for the Community Lamb Barn Project is Tuesday. Steve Karber is one of the co-founders of the program that provides a lamb for Greene County 4-H youth to take care of the animal, handle all of the responsibilities for it and then be able to show it at the Greene County Fair. He talks about how the program has really taken off.

“It’s been a great program for us. It’s helped our numbers as far as kids involvement, as well as lamb. So we went from a point of getting down to less than 15 kids involved, and showing, and raising lambs to 45 to 50. Part of that is just certain families but part of it also is this Community Lamb Barn Project. We’ve typically had 10 to 12 youngsters each year be involved with that.” 

Karber explains that the Community Lamb Barn Project has gotten so successful that it is drawing interests from others outside the county.

“We have other county fairs asking us, ‘How did you do this?’ ‘We’re losing our kids. How can we try to implement this at our fairs?’ Currently Madison County is one that usually has a lot of projects there, (they are) losing their kids from one species to a different species. So they’re asking us how we did this. Our judges that do our fairs think, ‘This is one of the greatest things they’ve seen.’”   

Contact the Greene County Extension Office at 515-386-2138, email Hardaway at hardaway@iastate.edu or stop by to sign up by Tuesday for the Community Lamb Barn Project.