Today was definitely one for the books-we got to go to three different stops today which were all absolutely astonishing. We started the day in St. Joseph, MO at Triumph Foods where I never though I could be so amazed by something. We got to learn a lot about what they do and actually got to walk the floor of where the actual slaughter process and see everything in action. It was very interesting how many employees they have and they had different colored hard hats that distinguished who had certain jobs. It was very interesting to watch how efficient they were all at their jobs and the amount of stations triumph foods had. It was an overall awesome thing to see and is definitely one for the books in terms of learning how the whole slaughter process works and how humane the animals are treated. They slaughter about 21,000 pigs daily with over employees. 
The second stop we went to was called Green Dirt Farms which was a sheep dairy. It was really cool to see a dairy other than one housed with cows. The farm had a single 12 milking parlor that had self lock gates, the sheep put out about 2 pounds per milking and they milk them twice a day. Their operation runs on a management intensive grazing system where they let them out to a pasture and rarely feed them grains. They currently have 75 ewes on sight after they lost their supplier for their ewes so the operation got smaller. They have their own cheese kitchen on site as well as they make yogurt. We also got to see their events center where they have events like their cheese appreciation event as well as farm dinners where a cook for the event is given two lambs and gets to make up their own menu for the event.
Our third stop was to the Lewis Seeds/ Monsanto Field Plots. This was really cool because everything we learned at the Monsanto Research Center was applied here and we got to see it in effect on their soybean plants as well as corn. They had really cool research going on with their soybean plants that they were very proud of. It was nice to be able to see what we were taught at the research center and see it actually on the farm.
