The guest is Deidrea Mabry, COO of the American Meat Science Association (AMSA), about her path from 4-H and FFA to Texas Tech, meat judging, and ultimately joining AMSA remotely after moving to Wyoming. Mabry describes her COO responsibilities, including managing sustaining partner and association relationships (including SMA), budgeting and financial stewardship, and organizing AMSA’s annual Reciprocal Meat Conference. She highlights how AMSA supports students through networking, leadership and professional development, and multiple career pathways beyond meat judging, from food safety and R&D to equipment, ingredients, pet food, aquaculture, marketing, law, and medicine. Mabry outlines AMSA’s outreach tools—Meat’s Pad podcast, newsletters, social media, monthly webinars, and websites like meatscience.org and a meat locker resource site—and encourages schools and extension agents to contact AMSA for help starting youth meat judging.

 Reach out to AMSA at https://meatscience.org/

Find SMA at https://southwestmeat.org/

Topics

00:52 Meet Deidrea Mabry

01:33 Path to AMSA COO

03:04 AMSA and SMA Partnership

04:16 Meat’s Pad Podcast

05:09 COO Duties and Budgeting

08:36 Beyond Meat Judging Careers

11:56 100 Years of Meat Judging

13:51 Sharing Resources and Webinars

17:37 Student Membership and RMC

20:48 Youth Judging and Closing