Indian Creek High School senior and FFA member Toby Sturgell, left, takes part in soil judging.
SUBMITTED PHOTO
For Johnson County’s most dedicated FFA members, agriculture is more than an extracurricular activity.
Whiteland Community High School senior Jenna Kelsay joined FFA in seventh grade, but her path to a career in agriculture was set long before she was born, Kelsay said.
“My great-grandparents and my grandparents and parents were in FFA, it’s a tradition to be in,” Kelsay said. “My favorite things are the dairy foods contests we made it to nationals in.”
This week is National FFA Week, highlighting the more than 735,000 student FFA members across the country. In Johnson County, local chapters have taken animals to Christina Place, gone to Indianapolis for Advocacy Day at the Indiana Statehouse and participated in Farmers Olympics.
For senior FFA members such as Kelsay, the week also serves as an opportunity to look back at the experiences and opportunities that the organization offered them.
Kelsay and her dairy judging team won gold in the fall in the Milk Quality Products category at the National FFA Convention in Indianapolis. In September, Kelsay traveled to Madison, Wisconsin, to compete in the World Dairy Expo.
Now, she is preparing to attend Purdue University to study agriculture sales and marketing. Although she had many accomplishments as part of FFA, one of her most rewarding experiences was meeting fellow members from around the United States during national competitions and conventions, Kelsay said.
“I’ve made lifelong friends that live halfway across the country. It’s really cool to see how the focus is different across the country,” Kelsay said. “I have friends from California who talked about growing fruit and in Florida they’re growing oranges.”
Johnson County’s FFA programs have brought students to competitions from here in Indiana to Oklahoma, where Indian Creek High School senior Toby Sturgell will compete in a national soil judging competition in May.
“With soils, I first did it in sixth grade and I didn’t know much about it or put much effort into it,” Sturgell said. “(Now), I’m pretty good at it and wasn’t too bad at judging the soils. I worked with (Agriculture teacher Joe) Dunn and we practiced a lot with my teammates memorizing the rules and knowing dirt and soil better. It’s a niche thing I really enjoyed doing, and enjoying it helped me become better and want to do it more.”
Sturgell will also attend Purdue University this fall, where he will study agricultural engineering. His plan is to design farm machinery, such as tractors, plows and planters, he said.
“Being in FFA really encouraged me to find a career in agriculture, just knowing all the people and networking in the agriculture community in Indiana, I found I really enjoyed it and thought it would be a good career path to go down,” Sturgell said.
For Whiteland Community High School senior Colton Martin, the FFA journey started with his father, who was also in FFA. As a seventh grader, Colton Martin would sell ice for FFA fundraisers. Martin plans to become a firefighter, but wants to maintain his family’s farm while he’s not at work, he said.
Although he already had an agricultural background, FFA helped him form connections with people he otherwise wouldn’t have met, Martin said.
“It’s everything, the people I’ve met,” he said. “Me and Jenna (Kelsay) will be lifelong friends and the togetherness FFA brings everyone and being an officer for the past three years besides Jenna and so many others, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It’s like one big happy family almost.”
