Many of you are probably focusing on the end of this school term and looking forward to the holiday break, but it's never too early to start planning for the upcoming National FFA Week celebration scheduled for February. Visit ffanewhorizons.org for web-exclusive articles or to share your best ideas for National FFA Week, comment on articles and submit photos. In my opinion, the key to having a successful – and fun – National FFA Week is really quite simple: Teamwork.
National FFA Week provides an excellent opportunity to develop your leadership, team spirit and communication skills. Several associations host bands during their State FFA Conventions and anyone can audition for the National FFA Band, Choir or Talent. Following the theme of this issue, consider using the website as a promotional tool for your chapter's National FFA Week plans.
Click on The Buzz for our new and improved Editor's Blog, where you can read little-known facts and stories from the 80th National FFA Convention and submit your own favorite memories from the event. The 2007 National FFA Week activities turned out to be a flurry for the Mabel-Canton FFA in Mabel, Minn. For more than 25 years, members of the Darlington chapter have hosted an annual all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast for the community to mark the beginning of National FFA Week.
The Fort Recovery FFA Chapter in Ohio hosts an annual Community Appreciation Breakfast as part of its National FFA Week activities.
Tradition
A Tractor
Story by Jessica Mozo
The summer holidays still last a few months, and it is not even the Friday before spring break. That's because it's time for the long-awaited Tractor Day – a 28-year-old tradition at Lincoln County High School in Fayetteville, Tennessee, where FFA members rise before dawn, don their Carhartt overalls and rev up the engines of their tractors. . . Cobb, now a college graduate, rode her family's tractor during Tractor Day all four years of high school.
With more than 50 tractors converging on the school parking lot, Tractor Day puts on quite a spectacle. 6 a.m., when tractors in red, orange, green and even blue appear in the school parking lot. A country breakfast at the school's farm store, sponsored by local tractor dealers, follows the tractor parade, where students feast on biscuits and gravy, scrambled eggs, country ham, sausage and hash browns.
Tractor Day is important because it gives the kids a chance to show off what they do every day,” said Jennifer Snoddy, Lincoln County FFA advisor. It's something that's unique to Lincoln County, and the kids look forward to it all year long. The school athletes have their days to shine, and this is a day for FFA members.”.
The Tractor Day tradition was started in 1980 by Stan Golden, former superintendent of Lincoln County Schools, and Tim Redd, director of farm labs at Middle Tennessee State University, when both were teachers and FFA advisors at Lincoln County High School. We wanted to spark interest in the agricultural program, and it's a real agricultural community,” says Golden. But Tractor Day is an educational opportunity even for students who are not involved in agriculture.
At scheduled times throughout the school day, teachers bring students out to the parking lot to see the tractors, and they are given a list of interesting agricultural facts to share with the students. Tractor Day proved to be an effective recruiting tool for Lincoln County's FFA chapter. It's a lot of fun because it gets us out of school for a while, and all of us eat breakfast together,”.
Celebrate FFA!
Many of the kids have dads and moms, aunts and uncles, and older sisters and brothers who have driven on Tractor Day," says Malone. The best part is that the community understands that high school kids can get involved, too. in agriculture. I've had students tell me the reason they joined FFA was because of Tractor Day, and one of them later became state FFA president," Golden says.
The old saying simply means that some problems can be solved more easily with two people working together rather than one person working alone. If two people have a better chance of solving a problem, just think what 10 or 12 can do. FFA presents countless opportunities to learn and practice teamwork, from competitions like cattle judging and parliamentary procedure to officer teams pooling their efforts to achieve a chapter's goals.
It's no secret that good teamwork skills pay off when you first enter college and the workforce, so why not start developing those skills now. After high school, they need teamwork skills on college campuses to complete projects in classes and work through problems with professors. We are constantly working on teams in FFA and interacting with others,” says Joshua Bledsoe, senior team leader for National FFA's Leadership & Education Program Delivery team.
Team, Go
Build Your Team
But get this: Thanks to one of the most promising developments in alternative energy, they're actually all connected. If you're not familiar with this new buzzword in agriculture, here's an explanation. E85” at the pump, which means the ethanol has been mixed with gasoline, and the number indicates the percentage of ethanol added.
Story by Chris Hayhurst
Business
Biofuels Mean
However, unlike most fuels, biofuels are made from renewable sources that are replenished as quickly as they are used up. Biofuels come from biomass, including crops like corn and soybeans, organic waste from livestock or even wood chips. Think about this: The United States now produces more than 5 billion gallons of ethanol and 600 million gallons of biodiesel every year.
This is just a drop in the bucket compared to petroleum fuels, but these numbers are increasing. Plants for the production of biodiesel are also being built, and demand for all biofuels is at an all-time high. Little Ileleji, if you are looking for work, or will be soon, this is all good news.
You will find jobs working in refineries, in handling and processing, and in process control. And then there are all the mechanical aspects of production, which also require workers – maintenance, plumbing, welding.” Ileleji says safety and environmental experts are also needed to make sure the conversion plants, which rely on complex chemical processes to convert the stored energy (from the sun) in biomass into usable fuel, are running.
In addition to these jobs, the industry needs construction professionals to build the plants, engineers to put everything together, scientists to develop more efficient conversion methods, and people to transport the finished product and deliver it to gas stations. If you decide to pursue a biofuel-related career, you could end up with a well-known company like Archer Daniels Midland, or perhaps a growing company like US BioEnergy, e85, or Marquis Energy LLC. For many jobs, it is important to have a strong scientific background - especially in chemistry and biology.
A high school graduate may find himself working in construction or any of the labor-intensive jobs required to keep. Corn is currently the most widely used biomass for alternative fuels, and corn has seen an increase in prices due to the ethanol industry. Those with graduate-level degrees would typically take jobs in research — looking for new uses for biofuels and sources of biomass or developing efficient conversion processes.
FYI FOR MORE INFORMATION
THE ENERGY POLICY ACT OF 2005 REQUIRES THE U.S
TO INCREASE ITS BIOFUELS USE EACH YEAR, RISING TO
CELLULOSIC ETHANOL CAN BE MADE FROM
COMPARED TO PETROLEUM
GASOLINE, BIOFUELS
A GASOLINE-TYPE FUEL MADE BY FERMENTING
BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL THAT CAN BE CONVERTED
SINCE BIOMASS IS RELATIVELY LIGHT-
IN “E85 FUEL,” THE NUMBER 85 STANDS
BIOFUEL BRAINTEASERS
Janette
Barnard
FYI JANETTE’S FAVORITES
When you can't control external events, you can always control your attitude and how you accept, forgive and love yourself, "says Fiore. The goals you set for yourself in the fall - to achieve English or finally to make sense of trigonometry - may have sounded like a breeze when school started, but it's easy to lose focus when the real work starts. You don't have to want to study, but you can choose to face what you're going to 'help you get through school,' he says.
Focus
The Season of
Spending
MAKE A LIST
PAY WITH CASH
COMPARE AND SAVE
PLAN AHEAD
MAKE YOUR OWN GIFTS
HAVE A GIFT EXCHANGE
PLAN AN EVENT
Speech
Power of
Convention Continues
100 Years of Tractors
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A native of Chicago, Ill., Flournoy joined the FFA chapter at Chicago Agricultural Science High School not knowing that his FFA experience would one day shape his future career. Today, Flournoy serves as a faculty member in the agricultural education program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Q You obviously jumped right into your FFA career, later being named national FFA president in 1991-92 – the first from an urban environment.
Corey
