ILVO

Today we met at our place of work for the next 3 weeks–ILVO. We got to see some of the different divisions within ILVO like animal science, plant science, food technology, and social science. The most shocking thing about today were the cows. The most common breed in Belgium is the Belgian Blue and they have double muscling!

In America this is considered a bad thing for cattle to have, but here they like it because it maximizes meat.

We are doing something different than I originally thought for ILVO. They are having an event that they refer to as Open Enterprises, where the general public is going to come in and see what it is that ILVO does. We took tours of the three main areas where the people will be, so that we could get an idea of what we had to work with… which is a little scary.

They want to have the animal part of their exposition to be in this barn, with live animals. This is a great idea because it really gets the people engaged with the livestock, but there are a few problems. For one, they are planning on having refreshments in here. It is a health and safety issue to serve beverages in a dirty, smelly cow barn. There are also electric fences that are not clearly marked, and the list goes on and on.

We have got to make this a workable idea, so we spent the last half of our afternoon brainstorming with the ILVO employees.

We didn’t get very far on the first day, but I think with the next two and a half weeks ahead, we can accomplish awesome things. I have faith that Arthur and Maggie Jo can finish it out perfectly.

After work, I got to go watch my host sister, Sarah, in a hip hop dance show! She dances for a company called iDancity, and they were great! I’m still very homesick, but I think I will be able to make it just fine. I talked for a long time with my mom and boyfriend and they made me feel much better. Tomorrow we are off to vegetable and pig farms!