Udder victory.

That's all that could be said after the Penn State dairy judging team won its competition at the Invitational Youth Dairy Cattle Judging Contest held Monday in Harrisburg. The team will travel to Madison, Wis., on Oct. 2 to try for the national intercollegiate title.

Coached by Dale Olver, instructor for dairy and animal sciences, the team includes juniors Brent Schuler and Jared Daubert and seniors Raechel Kilgore and Emily Yeiser, all of whom are animal science majors. They were chosen from a group of 13 applicants.

The competition tested the abilities of students to judge cattle based on physical structure and soundness of utters. Ten classes of cows were present, and competitors acted as professional show judges, combining all aspects of each animal into an overall numerical rating.

Placing was determined by evaluating which team ranked the cows closest to the official's rankings.

"We pretty much all learned how to do this because we were involved in the 4-H organization," Schuler said. "This summer we spent two weeks going to farms across Pennsylvania, judging cows."

Unlike professional judges, students were not permitted to get up close and personal with the bovine beauties.

Besides Yeiser, who lived a Maryland city, the rest of the team grew up on dairy farms and are used to everything, including the smell.

"The smell of cows doesn't bother me," Daubert said. "It's something that you get used to. A lot of people from cities come to our farm and they think it stinks a lot. I hardly notice it."

Despite her non-agricultural upbringing, Yeiser said competitions like this fuel her pursuit for a career in dairy marketing.

"My grandparents had cows so I got involved with 4-H," she said. "Eventually I bought a herd of my own."

Kilgore said being at Penn State has only nurtured her interest in heifer evaluation. "Here you can smell the dairy farms every now and then," she said. "We do have a very good program here."