Blue and Gold are the colors of the week. Schools all around are holding petting zoos and food drives. Freshman kids are being initiated into their Greenhand postions. School buses are carting kids to farm shows and skating rinks.
It’s FFA WEEK!
I don’t even have kids old enough to be in FFA yet, but we still celebrate right along with the high school kids. You see FFA was HUGE for me. As it still is today.
My first year of high school was rough. With divorced parents, one living in town and one in the country, I felt kinda misplaced. I was not an athlete. Did the cheerleading thing and it just wasn’t for me. My grades were just average. And, well, teenage girls are mean. BUT I was joining FFA. I didn’t really know why, other than my dad thought I should…..
I was hooked. I loved the kids in my class. I felt like I could really just be myself. And the instructor…. What can I say? Kyle Parks. Or as we all called him, “Parks”. His knowledge of agriculture and his ability to transform it for a bunch of punk kids was amazing. I still use the culling information he taught us in our 9th grade year. My children are amazed that I know how to weld. He kept us motivated and interested. His wise, kind words saved me from many a dramatic teenage girl meltdown. I see now that kids come and go in sports, drama, etc. But not Ag class. Once you started, you never left. And you were always telling your non-Ag friends, “You gotta come. It’s the most fun ever!”
What exactly happens in FFA? Lots of learning, disguised as fun! In four years I competed in numerous contests. For most of them, I was completely clueless about until I started. Let’s see…Dairy Cattle Judging, Livestock Judging, Horse Judging, Meat Evaluation, Horticulture, Entomology (bugs), speech, and my personal favorite Land Judging. Land judging meant we were loaded on a bus and dumped on a pasture that was kindly donated to be used by a hundred or so kids. They had holes dug and it was our job to decide what kind of soil was it. What was the slope of the land? We got to get dirty and learn a ton about soil, grass, and the grade of the land. But if that wasn’t your thing, there was always something else to try. There was no way you could graduate without acquiring some skill or trade.
The thing is, agriculture is everywhere. It feeds and clothes our families. If everyone had the opportunity to be involved in FFA, I feel there would be so much more understanding of how agriculture affects our world. So many headlines bash the cattle industry, or scream negatively about GMO’s. What if there was more learning about these topics? Just think of how many people are missing out on a juicy ribeye, just because they read one negative headline.
I was lucky to fall into FFA. I was loved and surrounded by students and instructors who believed in the future of agriculture. Just because you don’t have kids in FFA, keep supporting those kids. Buy the fruit, go to their events, hire them for help on your farm. Put forth the effort to build these kids up. They are the future of agriculture.
