White pants

Three pairs of white pants are packed in suitcases and headed to the Minnesota State Fair. This year, Dan, Monika and Daphne all earned spots in the State Fair 4-H dairy show. It still doesn’t seem possible that all of our kids are now state fair eligible.

When the kids were little, I seriously disliked white pants. (Actually, I disliked all white clothes.) Who on earth decided that dairy cattle exhibitors should don white clothing for showing off their projects? Blue jeans or black pants — like all of the other species — would make so much more sense.

Ten years later, I appreciate the tradition a bit more. My truce with white pants is due to better luck finding white pants and a better method for laundering.

I got a couple messages after county fair from another 4-H mom whose son is just starting out showing. His white pants wouldn’t come clean and she didn’t think she’d be able to find another pair before state fair. It reminded me of when I was first starting out with show whites.

Here are the tips and tricks that work for me:

Watch for deals on white pants: they often go on sale at the end of summer. I have a network of family and friends who also help me watch for deals. My sister-in-law found women’s white jeans at a warehouse-type store this summer for four dollars per pair. Yes, please.

Shop around. When someone needs a new size, I try to check both local stores and online retailers for the best prices. Dan needed new white pants this summer. I found new jeans for him from an online retailer for $20.

Always accept donations. As dairy families retire from showing, white pants are often passed along to other families like treasured heirlooms. I never say no to these offers, even if they aren’t sizes my kids currently wear. You never know when they’ll find their way back into the ring. I accepted a pair of jeans sized for someone much taller than any of my kids, but they were perfect for the young man who leased a dairy heifer from us last year.

Along those same lines, I still keep multiple sizes of outgrown white pants in our tote of show whites. A young man in our club needed white pants this year and a pair of Dan’s old pants were exactly his size. (I also have a collection of white, long sleeve shirts for showing poultry that outfitted several youngsters in our club this summer.)

If you can, purchase jeans made from cotton or mostly cotton. Sometimes you just have to buy the white pants that fit your 4-H student or your budget, but cotton pants won’t stain nearly as easily as jeans made with cotton-synthetic blends.

Finding white pants is one thing, keeping them white is another.

After a bit of trial and error, this is the white pants wash method I’ve stuck with for awhile:

Soak pants in very warm water with a scoop of OxiClean and a generous shot of Dawn dish soap. I like the unscented OxiClean because I’m not fond of strong fragrances. I also prefer the original Dawn dish soap. Our local livestock supply center carries gallon jugs of Dawn. I keep a jug in the laundry room and use it to refill an easy-squeeze bottle. I swear that OxiClean and Dawn are a magical combination.

My washing machine has both pre-wash and auto-soak features, which make soaking clothes much easier. If I didn’t have the auto-soak option, I would soak them in my utility sink.

Once the whites have soaked for a couple hours, run the pants through a wash cycle on a heavy soil setting with laundry detergent, another half scoop of OxiClean and another generous shot of Dawn.

After washing, if time allows, I check for any lingering manure stains. I treat any I find with a bit of Dawn dish soap and an OxiClean Max Force Gel Stain Remover Stick. These sticks have little nubs on the end that you can use to rub the gel and dish soap into the stain. Let the gel and soap sit on the fabric overnight and then launder again. This treatment will take almost everything out of mostly-cotton pants. It’s effectiveness is variable on synthetic blends.

This method is only an option because we’ve acquired a couple pairs of white pants for each kid. At our county fair, the 4-H dairy show is two days after the open class dairy show, so there’s usually not time for extended stain treatment. Before multiple pairs of pants, I just washed as above and hoped for the best.

Finally, as with anything, I do my best with the whites and then accept the outcome. Most white pants will never again be perfectly white after their first time around the show ring. But they’ll still allow my kids to do what they love most: show their cows and heifers.

Sadie Frericks and her husband, Glen, milk 100 cows near Melrose, Minnesota. They have three children: Dan, Monika, and Daphne. Sadie also writes a blog at www.dairygoodlife.com. She can be reached at sadiefrericks@gmail.com.