Howdy ANSC Club!

Here's the minutes from Wednesday's meeting, which was held at the lovely California Tortilla on Main Street. Thank you, Robert, for organizing our meeting's special location!

Treasurer's Report
Account: $1,074.30

Committee Reports
Service: We are scheduled to help out on Steve Cook's Farm on April 19th. Danielle will be contacting Barbara Graham at the Mary Campbell center to set up a dairy tour for the disabled woman. Also, we will be having our AgrAbility Speaker come talk to the club on Wednesday, March 22nd. In order to publicize this event so that others interested in AgrAbility may come listen to our speaker, we will put an advertisement in Talk of Townsend and put in a plug at AgCC.
Pre-Vet: More information on Pre-Vet speakers at future meetings.
Livestock: Concerning guest speakers, we are waiting to hear back from the Purdue representative. We will provide further details on Livestock speakers/trips at future meetings.
Fundraising: We will start advertising for our Plant Sale around April 1st. As far as other fundraising ideas, we hope to have another Car Wash when it gets warmer, and we also talked about potentially doing a Dog Wash. The club has had problems with Dog Washes in the past, so we need to discuss this idea further. If you have any other fundraising ideas, please contact Jenna at jscib@udel.edu.
Social: We're still discussing the location for our Banquet. Possible places include The Tracks or Timothy's. The Social committee will look into places/prices and have more information at next meeting.
*Reminder to Committee Chairs: Please fill out event reports online on the Club's webpage!

Regionals Report
Everyone who went to Regionals (NESA) this past weekend at UMass had an excellent time. And not only did we all have lots of fun, but we also did rather well for ourselves. The events started early Saturday morning with livestock judging, where we were all surprised to see that the "special class" was not alpaca (which we had studied how to judge the night before!) but tobacco leaves. (Apparently the Amherst area is big on Tobacco.) Then after judging livestock in the freezing cold, we braved our way through the snow to UMass' campus for the Quiz Bowl competitions and Research presentations. For the Quiz Bowl, one of our teams came in 2nd place, and they actually got to play the final round in front of everyone in a huge auditorium! Some other highlights were Erin McDowell for placing 6th in the Paper Presentations (thank you to Danielle Smarsh for donating your PowerPoint presentation!), Carolyn Schnek for winning 1st place in the Individual Research competition, and congratulations to all of our team members for helping Delaware place 4th for the overall competition!! Everyone did an awesome job! And to thank Dr. Gelb and the ANSC Department for covering our hotel costs at Regionals, a Thank You card was sent around at the meeting, and we plan on leaving a cake in the ANSC department office for the secretaries and faculty. We're all very proud of our club's success, and here's to future wins at NESA!

Ag Day
We're still discussing Ag Day T-shirt ideas. Carolyn came up with an idea of playing on "Duck, duck, goose," but instead of a goose, using a blue hen. Her idea is included at the end of the minutes. Please draw up any other T-shirt ideas you may have, and we'll vote on them at the next meeting.

Other
-The Extension Scholars program applications are due April 7th.
-Amanda received an alumni email from Karen Knutsen, who suggested that we include a column in the next alumni newsletter about what alumni are doing. The club also thought of possibly setting up a Yahoo account for alumni to log in and tell us about where they are now and what they're doing. If you have any suggestions on how we can keep tabs on our alumni, please email Amanda at akilby@udel.edu.
-Those who went to Regionals were so enthusiastic about their experience, that some of the club members have expressed interest in possibly hosting a high school-level judging and quiz bowl competition next year here at UD. This is a big idea that would require lots of help and commitment, but if we'd like to host something like this in the future, then it's important that we start thinking about it now. However, we should also keep in mind that it may be Delaware's turn to host Regionals in 2010! (The last time UD hosted Regionals was in '96.) In any case, if you'd be interested in helping out with something of this nature, please voice your opinions at future meetings, or email Amanda at akilby@udel.edu.

Alright. That's it for this week's minutes. Have a great weekend, everyone! And see you at next week's meeting on Wednesday, 3/8 at 5:30pm in Memorial 111.

~Jess
ANSC Club Secretary