Super Kids

LILY

The morning of the fair, Lily Kurtz, wakes up early. The ten year old bypasses the shower and breakfast table and heads outside, down the dirt road to her goats. She pulls them out to the pen to be scrubbed down with soap and water. Then, they move on to blow drying, nail clipping, even polishing. Once this is done, Lily in turn readies herself, her mom fixing her hair in elaborate braids. Now, all preparation is complete, the last five months of work at the mercy of one judge.

For the last two years, Lily has been raising two goats each spring and summer to show at the Boulder County Fair with 4H. And though she likes doing other, more typical ten year old-type things—like basketball, volleyball, swinging on her tire swing, swimming in nearby lakes—she stands apart with the intense work of prepping her goats for show.

“If you want to raise goats,” Kurtz says, “it takes a lot of skill because you have to know how to feed them and where the goat parts are.” Lily got her start thanks in part to her grandparents who have a goat farm. She and her older sister Hannah grew up playing at the farm, and it’s how Hannah got inspired to bring the craze to the Kurtz residence—her baby goat, Ruger regularly poses with Lily for pictures.

She begins the gradual training process in March, after picking out her goats. Squee-inducing as they are, earning a goat’s trust is hard. Undaunted, Lily works with them every single day, leading them around their pen and playing with them. “I spend a lot of time outside working with them and running around,” she says. “It helps me with all of my other sports.”

At the fair, Kurtz watches the competition and gauges how the judge is that day. When it’s her turn, she walks her goat around the pen, demonstrating she knows the parts of the goat—like the hawkes (i.e. goat “kneecaps”)—and then repeats this all over again.

Afterwards, contenders line up in order of ranking. Respectively, Lily has taken second and first place both years.

Next, it’s time for sale.

Since Lily raises market goats, they are sold for meat after the judging. “So we fall in love with them and then we have to sell them, and that is the most traumatic day,” tells Lily’s mom, Kelly. As an attempt to help curb some of the heartache, Lily plans to give more impersonal names to her goats this year: Goat A, Goat B, etc. This way, she can focus on “looking really sweet in the sale ring so that people pay a lot of money.”
Confident and poised, Lily exudes a kind of joy all kids deserve. Her secret? Not the ribbons and money, but quality time outside. She’s proof that, as she says, “if you go outside over and over again, you’ll feel like a new person.”