Holstein World: As the General Manager of a National Show (Spring Dairy Expo), what challenges have you faced with the changing book of ethics and how do you properly implement and carry out an effective and efficient testing procedure that is fair to all exhibitors?

Seth Johnson: Ethics enforcement has certainly come to the forefront of issues facing National Shows in recent years. We have a somewhat unique situation in Ohio in that the Ohio Department of Agriculture (ODA) is in charge of all ethics enforcement and show management is not directly involved in the testing or any disciplinary actions. However, we do work closely with ODA to ensure that the testing and procedures used are reasonable and will be acceptable to the exhibitors. Lining up to wait for an ultrasound or having hair measured is never convenient, but we try to make it as pain-free as possible. I think as each National Show has added additional ethics testing procedures, there have been some growing pains in the process, but overall, I think that we are able to run a clean show where exhibitors feel confident showing on a level playing field. It was dissappointing to see decreased participation when ethics testing was first added to our show many years ago, but I think that we still present a show with tremendous quality. We had 245 Holsteins and 150 Jerseys in 2006, one of our largest shows ever, and we look forward to even better things in 2007.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 9:13 am by sschmidt and is filed under Guest Blogger Series. Hits for this post:1547 You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.