Every summer, local youth and teens gather at fairgrounds and arenas to compete in cattle showing competitions, displaying the best of their livestock in competitions seeking prizes and generous bids for winners.

Drew Blauvelt, a graduating senior at Hillcrest Academy, has found a passion in these contests despite a glaring setback: he doesn’t live on a farm.

Blauvelt got involved with 4-H and FFA as early as the organizations would allow him, beginning in fourth grade and freshman year of high school, respectively.

He began his career with bucket bottle feeding, a project made to teach 4-H aspirants the responsibility needed to succeed in the field. Blauvelt and his sister raised a handful of calves with sweet feed and two bottles of milk each day.

After successfully raising and showing a bucket bottle calf, he came back the next summer for the returning bucket bottle category, which featured the same cows after a year of growth.

“Those were very informative years,” he said. “It was just bigger cows from then on out, it was like stepping stones, we kept getting into higher stuff.”

Baby bottle calves are around 100 pounds when received. Within two years, they grow to more than a half a ton.

The animals require tremendous space and food to grow at that rate, making cattle a big investment for anyone without specialized land and equipment.

Though the Blauvelt family lived in a mobile home on a farm when Drew was very young, they moved to “a home with a basement” in Wellman proper by the time he developed an affinity for cattle. They’ve managed to keep the cows in a pasture owned by a family friend.

Blauvelt, lacking experience with cattle before his competition involvement, was an underdog in the farmer-filled competitions.

“Since we didn’t live on a farm it was actually pretty interesting, my uncle had an old gestation building, and we put plywood over the slats and penned them in there, and then once they got a little bigger we got a pasture area for them to go,” Blauvelt said. “Ours wasn’t really the conventional way of doing it, because we didn’t have a place to put them, but after a while we got a place and it just kind of worked out from there.”

Despite his not having the advantage of living on a farm, Blauvelt has won a handful of breeding and calf cow classes, as well as a reserved champion overall title—comparable to a second best in show—plus two fourth place overall titles.

The Blauvelt family didn’t initially plan for the project to grow into much but quickly got attached after their first baby bottle calves and stuck with the activity.

“You breed the cows, and you wait the nine months, and then you help the cow give birth, … just watching that calf grow up and then either breeding it back or getting it ready for slaughter or getting it ready for show is just really an experience to have,” Blauvelt said. “You watch the whole thing grow up, it’s like watching a kid grow, but this one is a little faster because they go from 100 to 1,200 pounds in about 18 months.”

As they grow, the cows require tremendous care. They’re fed twice daily with grains and hay, and Blauvelt washes and walks them weekly to prepare them for shows.

Eventually, Blauvelt accumulated a herd of his own, breeding and buying new cattle while holding back his breeding heifers – female cows that had not yet calved – usually two per year.

With his interest sparked, Drew started entering in cattle showing competitions with the help of his older sister and dad, who helped lead the cattle at events before Drew was old enough.

County level competitions happen annually at county fairs, but smaller shows are held in the spring to help prepare those with time and resources to attend.

At the competitions, cattle are shown for various categories, such as breeding or market beef, with each category judged according to different criteria. Judges rank the animals based on the given criteria, and their consensus decides the winners.

Blauvelt said the shows were as competitive as any sporting event, with participants eager to win and crowds watching with anticipation.

Unlike high school athletics, however, those crowds contain not just the family and friends of competitors, but potential buyers willing to pay large sums for the prizewinning cattle.

Blauvelt said prices at county-level competitions could reach as high as $2 per pound, though the market price is much lower at the moment.

Despite his underdog position, Blauvelt said he hoped to secure a grand champion title in his last year on the circuit before moving to Cedar Falls to work in construction.

“There are people who consistently get good cattle,” Blauvelt said. “Sometimes there’s people who get good cattle out of luck, there’s other people who know what to look for… there are pretty consistent people in the top of good cattle, but I wouldn’t say they win every time.”