For high school students aspiring to pursue a career in agriculture, FFA is the activity to join. As the name implies, Future Farmers of America caters to budding farmers who have grown up around agriculture, and to those who have never experienced agriculture but seek to understand more about the careers within and importance of the agricultural sector. FFA is a great resource to plant important skills and knowledge within students, who harvest the benefits of such activity in their future careers. The program places a heavy emphasis on the importance of leadership. Being such a big focus, leadership is at the root of much of the organization’s activities, and FFA members engage in a wide variety of leadership exercises, such as the FFA Region VIII Fall Leadership Day that members of the Cannon Falls chapter were able to attend this Thursday, September 22nd.

During regional leadership day, all of the chapters within Region VIII gather at a central location, where they are then split into two groups: the greenhands (new members) and chapter leaders (old members). This year’s Region VIII Leadership Day was hosted in Rochester, where attendees spent the first half of the day touring local businesses rooted in agriculture and spent the second half of the day rotating through various leadership workshops. 

For the morning session, students were provided a wide array of opportunities, and group tours included an insider look at businesses like Sargent’s Nursery Inc., CHS, RCTC and Ziegler Cat. Grace Miller, FFA president and 5 year alumna, elected to attend a tour of CHS, stating that “I chose CHS, a co-op, which was great for me because we got to learn about the business side of things (which I loved because I got to use my Farm Business Management knowledge), look at the agronomic aspect of their business, and see the different nutrients they have stocked for farmers to put on their fields.”

Once students had finished their tours of the local businesses, they entered a series of afternoon sessions centered around leadership. For these meetings, FFA participants were split into three different groups, and each group completed a slightly different set of activities. Teagan Strecker, a senior who has been part of Cannon Falls FFA since her freshman year, partook in three mini-workshops: one about personality and perspective, one centered around “SMART goals,” and one about the relationship between leaders and followers in the workplace. Strecker expressed that “I thought that the workshop had a lot of really good advice for future leaders and I learned some skills that I can use in my future endeavors. I really enjoyed the personality and perspective module in particular.”

Overall, the day was a great success, and students were able to build on what they had learned through previous FFA activities. FFA’s basic premise as an activity governed by parliamentary procedure and divided into chapter, region, state, and national teams was greatly augmented by the leadership event. Students went far beyond their typical career development events (CDEs) and leadership development events (LDEs), where everything from public speaking, business management and forestry knowledge to cattle judging and natural resource analysis is investigated, planting the seeds of leadership within the richly cultivated field of agricultural knowledge.