FFA prepares students not just for agriculture but for life

If you visit the National FFA's website and check out its history, you can read about “33 farmboys” who gathered in Kansas City, Mo., in 1928 to define its mission of promoting agricultural education to the nation's youths.

“They could not have foreseen how the organization would grow and thrive,” says the site, www.ffa.org.

Maybe not — and maybe they couldn't have predicted how the FFA would evolve from their efforts.

Today it is by no means an organization limited to youths preparing for the day they'll take over the family farm.

Many teens enrolled in the various FFA chapters of Yuma County's high schools will go on to agricultural careers, but that doesn't mean they'll all end up in farm fields cultivating row after row of crops.

Some may become agribusinessmen and -women who sell farners the equipment or the seeds they need to prooduce their harvests.

Maybe they'll enter some field related to animal husbandry, or become veterinarians. Maybe they be landscapers or floral designers. Or run restaurants, or supply the restaurants the food that is served to the customers.

In one way or another, all of those jobs are linked to agriculture, and FFA will have helped them learn the fundamentals to thrive in their respective careers.

Leigh Loughead, Yuma High School's agricultural science teacher and its FFA advisor, says she and her counterparts at other schools in Yuma county would like to see all FFA members go into agricultural careers. But realistically speaking, she knows that won't happen.

And that's fine, she says, because FFA can help them, regardless of what they do with their professional lives.

By guiding them in hands-on agricultural projects and other activities, she notes, FFA instills in its members a work ethic, teaches them organizational skills, and shows them how to manage their time, money and other resources.

Who doesn't benefit from learning values and skills such as those?

“We do our programs to give (FFA members) everything they need to be successful, no matter what field they go into,” said Loughead.

The Yuma High chapter that Leigh oversees is one of four in the county, with others at Cibola, Gila Ridge and Antelope high schools. They plus Parker High School's chapter comprise the Yuma FFA District.

The Yuma district is one of eight in the state. Across the nation, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, there are more than 7,400 chaptes and more than 523,000 members, according to the organization's website.

Unlike other organizations that offer youths activities outside of school, FFA ties its programs in with the agricultural science curriculums at the schools. To be eligible for FFA membership, students must be enrolled in ag science classes at their respective schools, Loughead explains.

“FFA is intracurricular; we are not extracurricular,” said Loughead, who won the FFA's teacher of the year in Yuma district for five years and was the FFA state teacher of the year for 2003.

Aside from classroom study, supervised agricultural experience projects that are required of FFA members enable them to learn by doing for themselves.

Overseen by teachers the SAE projects offer the youths the choice of gaining entrepreneurial skills by undertaking agriculture-related money-making ventures, working or interning at farms or agribusinesses or conducting scientific experiments.

For their SAEs, Loughead's students have undertaken such projects as raising animals for show in Yuma County's annual fair, cultivating gardens and volunteering at the Humane Society of Yuma.

Altogether, the FFA membership at all the Yuma-area high schools together numbers around 300 students, Loughead estimates. And members come from more varied backgrounds than did their predecessors who help found FFA nearly a century ago – those “33 farmboys.”

When it started out, FFA was open only to male members. Girls were first admitted in 1969, Loughead said, but even then, some male advisors balked at having to teach them.

“They believed girls were supposed to take home economics,” she said.

Nowadays, often as not, more than half the members of Yuma High's chapter and of its agricultural science class are girls, she says.

And given that Yuma High's attendance boundaries fall within the city limits, she said, the chapter's members don't typically live on farm.

Cibola, Antelope and Gila Ridge high schools, by contrast, drawn many of their students from nearby agricultural areas, and thus their chapters tend to have a greater percentage of farm-bred members.

But whether members live in a farmhouse or a townhouse, FFA offers them a path to higher education and careers in agricuture or agriculture-related fields.

“We want all of them to go into agricultural careers,” said Loughead, “but realistically, we know that not all of them will do that.”

But wherever life leads the students, they can draw on what they learned in FFA, she says.

“Anything and everything we do can relate to a career.”