Judging the quality of milk might not get them to Hollywood, but it helped four Whiteland Community High School students win gold in the Milk Quality and Products category at the National FFA Convention and Expo this fall.
The gold category is not for a single team, but for multiple teams that receive the highest marks for their abilities to identify quality and potential defects in milk and cheese, as well as the ability to differentiate between dairy and non-dairy products. At the national FFA contest, five teams placed in the gold category, and Whiteland was one of them, said Hannah Goeb, agricultural science teacher.
The national competition took place in Indianapolis, as it does every year, and marked the first time a Milk Quality and Products team from Whiteland advanced to the national competition, she said.
To prepare for the contest, Goeb mixed different substances into milk and had students determine what the defect was, said Cian Cribbs, a sophomore in his second year on the Milk Quality and Products team.
“With defects, there’s multi, acid, garlic, bitter, rancid and more,” Cribbs said. “For practice, for bitter, Goeb would put coffee, and then for foreign, vanilla or bleach, for acid, buttermilk or lemon.”
Students weren’t ingesting lethal mixtures, as the bleach was heavily diluted and could be smelled before it was tasted, Goeb said.
Senior Jenna Kelsay was in her second large-scale FFA competition of the fall semester. She competed in the World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wis. in September. Back home in Indiana, she helped her Milk Quality and Products team attain placement in the gold category, and 11th in the nation individually, earning her a $400 scholarship, she said.
“I was super excited to see how I placed in the contest and wanted to see how I compared to people across the nation,” Kelsay said.
To advance to the national contest, the four students had to win the state competition, performing better than 20 other Indiana teams, Goeb said.
Cribbs continued his work with the team despite recently learning he was lactose intolerant. He now has to take lactose pills to mitigate the effects.
“It’s overwhelming, to say the least,” Cribbs said of the team’s performance. “When we got there, there were a lot of other states there, a lot of people coming out to do what I like to do. I like to do competitions, and I have good memories.”
For the team to place at such a level, the students had to work together and communicate well, said Lilly Pryor, also a senior, who joined FFA in seventh grade.
“We were able to communicate well and ask questions for each other, bounce ideas,” Pryor said. “It’s great life skills to learn, presenting in front of people, working with a team. We learned that through all the stuff we’ve done in FFA.”
