UW-Platteville senior ready for last state fair shows

This will be my last year. I want it bad.

-- Sophia Daugherty

The first of the lasts start Saturday night for UW-Platteville's Sophia Daugherty. 

After seven years of showing off the university's prize pigs on some of the biggest stages in the Midwest and the country, the fifth-year senior agricultural education major will be making her final turns in the competition show ring at the Wisconsin State Fair in West Allis. She'll be on the road again next week and in September to show at the Iowa State Fair and the National Barrow Show in Austin, Minnesota. After that, all the walking, the feeding, the cleaning will be just a memory as she speeds toward graduation in December. 

"This will be my last year," Daugherty, 22, said as she took a break Tuesday from cleaning her pigs' pens at Pioneer Farm, UW-Platteville's working swine and cattle farm. "I want it bad. I do want to make my own mark for myself this year."

Daugherty, who hails from Cuba City, has literally spent her entire life on Pioneer Farm. Her father, Justin Daugherty, has worked at the farm for 19 years managing beef cattle. She would often tag along with him to visit the pigs, she said. Over the years she built a special relationship with ...