Welcome back to episode three of my life as a CCE intern. During the week of June 21st to June 27th, I put most of my time and energy into creating the pre-farm questionnaire that we’ll be using (hopefully soon) as a tool to assess horse farms. Some areas of it, such as general biosecurity, were straightforward in that I had already done a lot of research and had a good idea of questions that would assess that topic. However, other areas were more specific topics that I hadn’t done too much research on yet, such as the precautions a good breeding operation takes to protect its horses from venereal diseases, which is the fancy way of saying horse STDs. I had a spend a whole day looking into those to familiarize myself with proper breeding-specific biosecurity protocols, and along the way, I discovered that AAEP is a really great horse resource!
I am using Qualtrics to create the questionnaire, and I spent some time playing around with the program to discover all of the fun options it has. And it does have many! For example, there’s a way to make certain questions appear or not appear based on answers to previous questions. It’s pretty similar to Boolean logic and if / if else conditionals used in coding. It works great to guarantee that only horse farms identifying as breeding operations receive questions relating to breeding-specific biosecurity.
Here are some of the other interesting things that happened this week:
- I went through the desk that is now mine and found a CCE nametag that I’ve claimed for myself.
- I accompanied by supervisor who’s in charge of local 4-H to two riding evaluations.
- I get to hear all of the interesting stories my office-mate has from answering farm-related phone calls
That’s all for now!