Cambridge FFA Sweeps Nationals for Second Consecutive Year

The school’s chapter of the FFA, or Future Farmers of America, is now the two-time national champion in Agricultural Communications.

The club attended the National FFA Convention and Expo in Indianapolis from Oct. 24 through Oct. 28, where over 67,000 FFA members competed for first place in the country.

The National FFA Organization is a nationwide organization for students interested in agriculture and agricultural education. It has over 650,000 members in total.

One of the school’s three competing teams, the Ag Communications team, took home first place in its field for the second year in a row.

“The goal is for kids to compete in this, and then they’re better prepared for a career in copy editing, journalism, things like that,” said Agriscience and Veterinary Education teacher Sarah Nerswick.

The winning team consisted of seniors Brittany Breedlove and Hayley DeSandre, and juniors Cailey Doyle and Aaliya Garrett.

They began preparing for the competition around late October of last year. Nerswick said the 2018-2019 teams would begin preliminary competitions this week.

Throughout the year, the FFA teams participate in mock competitions, summer leadership camps and other programs to prepare for Nationals.

“We had practice four times a week when we went to Nationals,” said Breedlove.

In order to get to Nationals, each chapter has to submit a slew of activities, such as programs they have organized or participated in that benefit agricultural education. The top qualifiers at region and state competitions advance to the national competition.

Ag Communications competitions have four parts: media plan, presentation practicum and quizzes.

The media plan section is a plan the team makes to solve an agricultural education-related issue in their community. In the presentation section, they present the plan to a panel of judges.

The Ag Communications team’s plan was entitled “#ffaliveshere”, which Nerswick said was a movement started by sophomore Spencer Gray to show that FFA is not restricted to rural agricultural areas, and to get counties without agriculture education to implement it.

During the practicum, competitors listen to a press conference and then create responses to it in various formats: video, web design press release and opinion piece.

The final component of the competition, (the quizzes), were tests about AP style.

Whoever scores the highest in the practicum and on the quizzes is named the competition’s “High Individual.” Garrett took that distinction this year.

Doyle also placed well, getting fourth overall and first in the web design section.

Half of this year’s winning team will be graduating, but that doesn’t mean that the remaining FFA members will stop working to get to Nationals in the future.

Breedlove said next year the team would like to focus on winning the competition in a different field of FFA.

“What we want to do next is we want to try Agricultural Issues,” she said.

Each member of the winning team received $1000, which DeSandre said would go toward college. Each of Cambridge’s other two teams also received $500 for the chapter for their program of activities.

“We were all working so hard for, like, a year, so it just sort of told us that all our hard work paid off,” said Doyle.