by: Briar Simpson, Greenwood Community High school

Senior Jessica Taylor isn’t any normal 4H-er. Instead of crafts, she handles chickens year round. Jessica is a part of many clubs such as Robotics, Yearbook, and Key club, and most importantly 4H.

 4H is a kind of club or community people can join all around the US and engage in different fun activities, with projects and competitions. The 4 H’s stand for Head, Heart, Hands, and Health. For the first 4 years of her 4H experience, she did pretty much normal things. These were things like crafts, projects, and even doing some cake decorating and shooting. Now, it’s more than that.

“I still have to do all of those projects, archery, and cake decor. Just now with showing these chickens at an annual competition, ” Taylor said.

For the last 6 years she has been showing poultry alongside those things. Jessica decided to join this because her little sister started talking about it.

“We live on a farm, and my little sister had heard about it from somewhere, and we ended up buying chickens just for that,” Taylor said.

Although 4 H allows many different types of birds shows she talks about what kind she personally prefers to show.

“In the past I’ve shown off a unique bird, the Guinea Fowl. Guinea Fowls are extremely loud birds. That’s why we want to get rid of them. Other than that, we do chickens,” Taylor said.

Taylor talks about the work she has to do with the chickens leading up to the competition and how the competition is split up between birds.

“There’s two different categories of birds, banum, and large fowl. Banum is small and Large fowl is large. There are more categories between that like different breeds. I have to prepare the chickens starting a week before the comp. I bathe them and do more touch-ups the day of. Fluffing feathers and just making them look really good,” Taylor said.

Taylor is very good at what she does, she really enjoys these competitions. Even scoring the highest you can at one of these competitions. 

“I think I’m good at showing chickens, I even placed 1st last year, or as we call it, Bird of the Barn. The lowest I’ve scored was 9th place, I’ve learned from that since then,” Taylor said.

Rising senior Jessica Taylor takes her last bite of Ice Cream before she has to head back to her dorm room at IU. Taylor just attended a class for her HSJI trip at IU, she had to work on a page for her yearbook at her school, Caston Junior Senior High School. “The classes here are a long walk, but the ice cream makes it worth it.” Briar Simpson Photo