Last year, construction on a brand-new greenhouse was finished, and this year, Mrs. Chase, one of FFA's two leading advisors, is back. Amid all these changes, we wanted to learn more about one of the institutions of Central. We sat down with the District Vice President and our school's Chapter President, Melissa Diaz-Vaca, and Recorder Elisa Rodriguez to talk about FFA.
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Haven: So what is FFA?
Elisa: FFA is a student-led organization that was created by students here in America. It helps kids develop career skills, and leadership skills, and obviously, most importantly, it all focuses on agriculture.
Haven: So Future Farmers of America…
Both Elisa and Melissa: It's not future farmers. Oh, no, don't say that. Please don't say that.
Elisa: Okay, so that's how it was in the past. But now it's an open acronym to be more welcoming and inclusive.
Henry: Yeah, so it doesn't stand for anything then?
Melissa: Well, it can stand for a Future For All. There’s another one that's Free For All…
(Editors note: some disagreement over the title, best to just call it FFA for now).
Haven: What do you do for FFA?
Melissa: We do a lot of the chapter meetings and a lot of competitions. We do one competition a month, and they're all different. So we have soil evaluation competitions, job interviews, prepared public speaking, AG sales, oh, and Vet science. And then we also do a lot of community-based events. So we do fundraising, like the plant sale, or like community service doing road cleanup, and then Food for All is one of our bigger events as well.
Haven: What's your favorite part of FFA?
Elisa: Meeting new people and traveling around the state... You meet everybody in different parts of the FFAs around Oregon and so you get a lot of connections.
Melissa: We meet businesses, and because of that we’ve met a lot of CEOs with FFA, we have dinners with them and conferences with them. But also like just improving ourselves as leaders and as people. We’ve gained a lot of confidence just through FFA, both of us.
Haven: So with FFA do you have to raise animals?
Melissa: That's something that people ask us a lot. So we don't have land, we have an FFA barn for people that don't have land and it's free of charge to use if you want to show an animal, but you don't have to do it.
Haven: That’s cool- I'm learning stuff here. So with that, how do you get involved with FFA? What would I need to do?
Melissa: You just need to show up to things.
Elisa: We have a monthly chapter meeting which is an easy way for you if you want to get involved. We have a new monthly newsletter and it's a really good way to see what we've done and what we're planning to do. Or just go to Lynn and Chase’s and they have sign-ups for all the competitions that we have coming up.
Haven: Okay, okay. Is there anything else that should be mentioned for FFA? Like some of the fun things you've done. I don't know, like Indianapolis- I heard about that last year. That was interesting.
Elisa: Yeah, it's really fun. This message is for freshmen: We want to go to Indianapolis again next year for the national convention, but we need freshmen to get a group of people so that we'd be able to go.
Haven: Thank you so much for being a part of this! I’m excited to try and do some more stories about Central, so thank you so much for being the first one and sitting down and talking about FFA with me!
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Big thanks to Melissa and Elisa for the interview, as well as Henry for transcription and editing. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Edit: September 28, 2023- Original article misspelled Melissa's last name and was fixed.