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Silo FFA teams continue to impress


Posted Date: 01/05/2023

Silo FFA teams continue to impress

Silo FFA teams continue to impress

By Hayden Schulze
Journalism Staff

Silo Public School’s FFA team has been dominating several competitions that have been hosted the past few years, winning multiple awards as their teams continue to get better and better every year against other schools of all sizes.

They have taken home runner-up honors in state competition for the past two years with hundreds of schools of all size in it. They were edged out by Edmond last year and Kingfisher the year before that. As more and more people join FFA, the better their teams get, meaning higher chances of winning competitions. But what is FFA?


FFA was created in 1928 and has been rapidly becoming very popular in the past few years. Many schools are taking on FFA to teach their students everything regarding plants and animals. You can do a range of activities in FFA, there are up to 70 different things you can do, such as welding or shooting.
 

FFA also has different branches inside of it. Including nursery and floriculture, dairy, entomology, food science, and much more. FFA has different competitions for each of these branches. These competitions can range from telling flower species to how heavy your cow is. Most of these competitions are in March and April, however there are a few that aren’t within these months. As for Silo, they go to the majority of competitions after Spring Break.

   
According to Mr.Brown, who has been teaching FFA for 13 years, there are different divisions in FFA, there are Junior and Senior divisions. Seventh, eighth, and ninth, are the junior divisions, 10th, 11th, and 12th, are the senior divisions. This year, there are 217 students currently enrolled in FFA at Silo. 

 

“Unlike basketball or baseball, we go against all of the schools that are doing FFA across the state, and not just schools in our class size,” said Mr. Brown, There are around 260 schools doing FFA this year statewide.

To pay for trips to competitions, FFA does a Blue and Gold fundraiser each year where students go around and sell food items. The money they get for the fundraiser all goes towards FFA’s trips. Most of their competitions last approximately two to three hours. Sometimes they compete out of state, but it’s mostly in state.

 

All branches of FFA need a lot of practice. After all, practice makes perfect. For example, the shooting team at Silo will need to shoot all the targets with just one shot each during competitions. So, all the students will go out into a field somewhere and practice their shooting. According to Mr.Brown they have around the same amount of kids participating in that every year. 

“Usually, we start with around 10 kids, then at the end of the year, we have seven or eight,” he added. 

   
For Greenhand competitions, the students do a one-man academic meet over the history of FFA. The student that is chosen will have to memorize 50 questions. And there are around 50 to 80 kids in that statewide competition in which Silo has been very successful.