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Three Girls, Eighty Cows, and a Clean Sweep of the Dairy Barn
Maren, Greta, and Liv Vekved took grand champion dairy calf, cow, and steer in the same afternoon — the first sweep by one family in the barn’s memory — and all three animals load out Wednesday for St. Paul, where the girls have been before and their mother has stopped being nervous about it.
AT THE FAIRGROUNDS — They came into the ring eleven minutes apart in 2014 and they have been doing everything eleven minutes apart ever since, and Saturday morning the Vekved triplets went one, two, three through the dairy barn and came out with the whole thing.
Maren Vekved, 12, took grand champion dairy calf with a spring Holstein heifer she has been leading since she was small enough to be pulled over by it, and was. Greta Vekved took grand champion dairy cow with a four-year-old out of the family’s own herd, a cow the family calls Bernice and the show program calls something considerably longer. Liv Vekved took grand champion dairy steer, a class she entered in the first place because, in her words, “somebody has to and they were both doing girls.”
It is, so far as the barn superintendent can determine and so far as anyone at the rail could remember, the first time one family has taken all three championships in the same year. Karl and Janet Vekved, who milk eighty head east of town, watched from the same spot they have watched from every year, and Janet Vekved reported that the hardest part of the morning was that all three finished within forty minutes and she had, in her words, “no time to get sensible between them.”
All three animals load out Wednesday for the State Fair, where the girls showed last year and placed respectably and learned, per Maren, “that the barn down there is longer than our whole road.” The trip is a full week: the dairy show runs in the fair’s first days, the girls stay with an aunt in Roseville, and their father drives the cattle down himself because he has never once let anyone else haul his animals and does not intend to start.
They will also, this year, miss the first two days of seventh grade, the district having started before Labor Day for the first time in its history. Asked how she felt about that, Liv Vekved said the school had been very nice about it and that she had already gotten the work, and then, after a pause that her mother says is the most Vekved thing about her, added: “Also we’re going to the State Fair and they’re going to school.”
