Bridger Mongeau and little sister Greeley look over the pigs for his 4-H project.
Nancy Edmonds Hanson
For Clay County youth, 4-H is far more than a fun way to make friends, take a trip to the State Fair and dig into lessons on livestock and leadership. It’s a year-round way of life.
Those are words the Mongeau family lives by. Moorhead High School students Bridger and Croix Mongeau are third-generation members of the Barn Buddies 4-H Club. Little brother Laken is on the way as a Clover Bud, a group of youngsters in kindergarten through third grade. The youngest of Brad and Jenny’s offspring, daughter Greeley, is marking time until she’s old enough to join her brothers.
Along with their fellow Buddies, the boys have just completed a year of raising their pigs and goats and training their horses. Successful showings at the Clay County Fair culminated in trips to the Minnesota State Fair and the Minnesota 4-H Horse Show, where the eight teens from the county came away with 18 top-10 rankings in competition with a total of 608 youth from across the state.
“I grew up in Barn Buddies,” Jenny points out. “My folks, Matt and Kathy Valan, were our leaders in those days. I was really into horses. I got to go to the state fair three times – once with my horse, once with my pig and once with a static [non-livestock] project.” Now a third-term member of the Clay County Commission, she credits the 4-H leadership program with preparing her for public life.
“Now I love it that my kids are in the same club that I came up in, along with the kids of some of the members I grew up with myself,” she says. She became the club’s leader in 2012 when Bridger entered kindergarten. Today she co-leads the club – whose members hail from the Comstock and Sabin area, Barnesville and Moorhead – with her neighbor. veterinarian Dr. Tanya Borud/
The Mongeaus live on a farmstead just west of the Valan home place where she grew up. There, the younger Mongeaus care for three horses along with five pigs and a pair of goats. Those critters, too, have won Bridger and Croix a bouquet of ribbons in Clay County and at the state fair. The younger siblings have caught the livestock bug, too; Laken and Greeley have been raising chickens and showing them in open-class competition at the annual Barnesville competition.
But horses are at the top of their list. Both Croix, a freshman at MHS, and Bridger, an MHS senior, have taken their horses, Dolly and Johnny, to state events since they were old enough to qualify in sixth grade. They have competed in a wide selection of the western and games events, including poles, barrels, jumping, keyhole racing and general horsemanship. The brothers have also placed consistently in roping. Croix won the roping event last year, when he and Bridger posted the two fastest times.
Bridger was reserve champion in the poles event on the first day at state; he would have had the grand champion time, he says, if he hadn’t knocked a pole on the second day. He also placed third in the jumping figure-8 event and ninth in barrels. His younger brother placed fifth in keyhole and seventh in the western pleasure class. Together, they came home with five ribbons.
“Winning is great, but the State Fair is more about the experience and the hard work it takes to get there,” Jenny observes.
Living as a 4-H family can be demanding on both the younger and older generations. “We’ve had to make decisions as a family on the activities we do so we’re not split up and running in different directions,” Jenny says. While both Croix and Bridger compete on the Spuds wrestling team and have played in orchestra – Croix on cello, Bridger on violin – they’ve had to narrow their focus.
“In the summer, the boys want to do rodeo and livestock. No soccer, no baseball,” their mother says. “They get their livestock in April, and we just sold the last animal last week, so basically that’s our summer.” She says the family spends three or four nights a week taking the boys to horse or livestock activities throughout the season.
Beginning with the county fair and regional Western Heritage events in July, the calendar gets crowded. The pressure rose a notch in August, when the early opening of Moorhead schools collided with the State Fair in St. Paul. “The 4-H barns opened at 2 a.m. on Wednesday, the day before school started at home,” Jenny recalls. “It was a little crazy.” The Mongeau boys missed the first two days of school, but got home late the next Sunday.
Then they were off to the Minnesota 4-H Horse Show back in St. Paul in mid-September. Almost all of the Barn Buddies who qualified came home with ribbons. One member, Madeline Brendemuhl, excelled in the leadership program, being named as a finalist for the top Dan Patch award for the second year; she placed first in hippology, displaying her knowledge of horses, and third in horse judging. Another Clay County girl, Tatum Demmer of the Stable Mates 4-H Club, was named Grand Champion in the Challenged Rider category. Croix rode Dolly and carried the flag for Clay County in the Grand Entry.
“The state horse show is the capstone of the 4-H year,” Jenny explains. During the rest of the year, the club meets once a month or so, generally alternating between meeting in members’ homes and the Kurtz Township Hall, and working on service learning projects. Among the latter: planting trees and painting buildings at the fairgrounds, collecting books for the Lakes and Prairies Community Action, and gathering socks for men at the Clay Correctional Facility and baby supplies for new mothers.
So what has made 4-H such an indelible experience for three generations of this family, and for all the other kids who have grown up in Clay County’s 4-H clubs throughout the years?
“The fairs are fun, but that’s just part of it. It’s everything – just all of it,” Croix says.
His mother adds, “Our club used to be a bunch of young kids. Now they’re mainly high school. These kids have grown up together. Kike me and my friends, they are forming deep friendships along the way.
