Day 7

We spent all of Monday at University of Nebraska-Lincoln touring their feedlot, campus, ag programs, and tractor testing facility.

They have an extremely large feedlot and a lot of land for a university. Their feedlot has 2,500 cattle and the school owns about 90 acres. They run their feedlot steers and do some research on them and they also have some cows and calves for research. They mix all their own feed and have trucks that drive by the feed bunks and dump in. Some of the steers in the barn had the specific feed bunk that only opens for the steer with the right neck tag. We learned a little about these at Purina so it was cool to see them in action.

The Ag program seemed to have a lot of options and could go pretty specific. We got a tour of the animal science program and I thought it was really cool that they have a dozen of each animal on campus in the building to use in classes for hands on learning. Their meat classes are becoming more popular and to teach about cuts of meat have a chilled classroom with a carcass rack that trails along the ceiling from the meat cooler.

My favorite part of the campus was walking out of the hallway and straight into an arena-seriously so  cool. The school horses are stalled right next to the arena and it’s all connected which I’m sure is handy in the winter time. UNL has an accomplished equestrian team and the school also used the arena with the other animals as well.

In the state of Nebraska it’s a law to have tractors tested to ensure that they will do everything that is advertised before they can be sold. Even though it’s only a law in Nebraska, everyone chooses to have their tractors tested because their clients want to buy something that has been proven to work correctly. UNL has the only tractor testing facility in North America and tractors are tested for horse power, PTO, etc. I found this part super interesting and would have loved to see tractors out there being tested while we were there.

We also got to check out UNL’s football program. Our former football coach, Mike Riley, is now the football coach at UNL. Although we weren’t able to meet up with him, we still got to check out where the team practices and even go out on the field. Their stadium is huge- it holds 92,000 fans. On game days, the stadium is the 3rd most populated city in Nebraska; Omaha being first and Lincoln being the second most populated.