Blanco County Youth Show: Official Flake of Hay Keeps Shrinking
Johnson City Rules Committee Defines “a Flake of Hay,” Seals the Official Reference Flake Under Glass, and Watches It Lose Weight Every Week
JOHNSON CITY, Texas — The Blanco County 4-H and FFA Youth Council has adopted its first formal unit of measurement, Blanco County Standard No. 1, “The Flake,” after a single sentence in the show rule book generated nineteen written questions, three phone calls and one hay grower who drove to the extension office with a tape measure and asked to “see the flake in charge.”
The sentence limits each animal in the show barn to a flake of hay. It does not say how big a flake is. For a committee of volunteers in a county whose largest crop is hay, that was “not an oversight,” one member told Farm.FM. “That was a vacuum.”
The standard runs fourteen pages. Excerpts follow.
Section 1: Scope, and the Blanco County Youth Show Rule Behind It
The 2027 Blanco County Youth Show rule book allows only a flake of hay per animal and forbids hay as bedding. The show runs January 4 and 5 at the Blanco County Show Barn, with cattle, sheep and goats on the first day and poultry, swine and rabbits on the second.
Section 1 states that the standard “applies to all hay within the Blanco County Show Barn, all hay approaching the Blanco County Show Barn, and any hay that has been spoken of in connection with it.”
The nineteen questions, reproduced in an appendix, include “Is a flake measured before or after the goat?”, “If my bale was made by a different baler, is my flake a dialect?” and, from a Blanco FFA freshman, “Can I just bring a normal flake?” The committee marked the last one “deferred.”
Section 2: Definitions
The definition took four meetings. Hay growers testified that a flake is “what falls off a square bale when you cut the strings.” Asked how thick, they gave seven answers, each with the same hand gesture held at a different width.
A cattle exhibitor argued that a flake should be measured by what a steer considers a flake, “which is a bale.” A goat exhibitor argued it should be measured by what a goat considers a flake, “which is whatever you are holding, your sleeve, and the clipboard.” The clipboard was replaced.
The adopted definition reads: “Flake (n.): One naturally separating section of a conventional small square bale, of Blanco County origin, of average character, held together by its own convictions.”
Section 3: The Reference Flake of Blanco County
To settle disputes, the committee decided the county needed one physical flake against which all others would be judged, in the manner of the old platinum kilogram kept in a vault outside Paris.
A bale was purchased from a Blanco County grower. Its flakes were laid side by side on the extension office conference table at 206 S. Highway 281 and narrowed, by secret ballot, to the most average. The winner, now designated BCS-1-P, weighed 4.20 pounds on a postal scale and was sealed beneath a glass cake dome borrowed from a Johnson City bakery.
It has since become a minor attraction for visitors on the US 290 wine trail. A man from Austin asked if it was organic. Staff said it was “average.”
Section 4: Tolerances, and the Problem of Negative Hay
For tolerance, the committee borrowed from elsewhere in the rule book, which allows no re-weighs but grants a 5-pound tolerance on certain weight minimums. Section 4 accordingly declares a legal flake to be “4.20 pounds, plus or minus 5 pounds.”
It took two weeks for anyone to notice that at the low end of the range, a flake may legally weigh negative 0.80 pounds.
An emergency meeting was devoted to negative hay. One member argued that negative hay “helps with cleanup.” Another said that if negative hay existed, Blanco County, with 776 farms and average sales of $23,463 per farm according to the 2022 Census of Agriculture, had “probably been growing it for years.” The section was tabled.
Section 5: Drift
Weekly inspections brought a more serious problem. The reference flake was drying out in the office’s central heat. It weighed 4.20 pounds in September, 4.09 in October and 3.98 by the first week of November.
Because the standard defines every flake in Blanco County relative to BCS-1-P, the committee’s legal reading is that every flake of hay in the county has grown heavier by comparison, every week, without anyone touching it. Growers were notified by letter. One raised his price per bale the next morning, citing “Section 5 appreciation,” and has sold out.
The committee notes proudly that the Paris kilogram also drifted. “Ours drifted faster,” one member said. “That’s a Hill Country flake. It’s not going to sit still for anybody.”
Show-day verification raised its own problem. The rule book bans blowers in the show barn, allowing them only on cattle, in the cattle barn. The committee ruled that the reference flake, being lighter than a steer and more nervous, may not travel through any area where blowers operate.
The transport plan calls for the flake to be carried from the extension office in a picnic cooler, at walking pace, with every cattle-barn blower switched off as it passes. A volunteer walks ahead ringing a cowbell. Inspectors must reach goat pens within six minutes of feeding, after which, the committee concedes, “the evidence is gone.”
Revision B: What the FFA Freshman Built
The standard was superseded on Tuesday by a piece of square tubing.
The freshman whose question was deferred spent the fall on a shop project, which in Blanco County may be a trailer, ag equipment, an outdoor cooker or a home-convenience item. Hers is a welded steel frame with a single rectangular opening, painted green, with one word stenciled on the side: FLAKE.
The instructions, also stenciled, read in full: “If it fits through the hole, it is a flake.”
Tested against BCS-1-P, all seven growers’ gestures and a steer exhibitor’s bale, it took eleven seconds. The committee voted unanimously to adopt the gauge as Revision B and retire the fourteen-page standard, which itself would not fit through the hole.
The gauge will hang at the show barn entrance in January. A second one, to be finished over Thanksgiving, goes to the shop project silent auction on sale day, where two hay growers plan to bid against each other “until somebody faints.”
That left the reference flake. Under the rule book it cannot be used as bedding. Under the committee’s own resolutions it cannot leave the county. It was decommissioned on Wednesday and fed, with a short ceremony, to a Boer wether entered in the January show, who was issued a certificate of calibration. He is now the most accurately fed goat in the Hill Country, and he would like another one.
Five Humorous Observations About Texas 4-H Livestock Shows
- Seven hay growers, seven answers, one hand gesture. That’s not a definition. That’s every fish story in Blanco County with hay in it.
- A legal flake can weigh negative 0.80 pounds. Somewhere a cattleman just realized that explains his entire feed bill.
- The reference flake lost two-tenths of a pound in two months and a hay grower raised his prices over it. That’s the first time in Hill Country history drying out made anybody money.
- They walked a flake of hay through the cattle barn in a picnic cooler while a volunteer rang a cowbell. In fairness, that’s how most of us would like to be escorted through a cattle barn.
- Fourteen pages, four meetings and a cake dome, beaten by a freshman with square tubing and a stencil. The committee adopted her answer in eleven seconds. The question had been deferred for three months.