Awarded Honorary State FFA Degree
As many students took a long exhale this summer, Franklin High School’s Future Farmers Association students and their instructor Jenny Collins have been hard at work preparing for fair season.
“We started off, graduation hit, and then we went to FFA camp and came back for practices,” Collins said. “I went to state competition at the end of June, and then July 1, we started our beef heifer program, and so we’re getting ready for a show that’ll start in a couple weeks.”
That state competition featured Collins getting rewarded for years of work with the Honorary State FFA Degree.
“The Honorary State FFA Degree is the highest honorary degree awarded by the North Carolina FFA Association and is presented at the annual State FFA Convention. A maximum of 12 nonteacher individuals from across North Carolina may be awarded the Honorary State FFA Degree each year,” the North Carolina FFA states. “The purpose of the honorary degree program is to recognize individuals who have rendered outstanding service to the North Carolina Agricultural Education/FFA Program.”
A Franklin High agriculture teacher since 2007, Collins has wanted the honorary diploma for years, but finally receiving it was a surprise.
“My teaching partner, Devon [Deal], put in the application for me, and then I got an email, and I was just, I’ve been wanting it for a while, so it was super cool to be able to achieve it,” Collins said. “I realized I was getting it, and then got to walk across the stage at our state convention at the end of June and be recognized.”
Collins said her work with the Special Needs Goat Show during the Macon County Fair and international trips helped contribute to receiving the honorary degree.
The most recent of those international trips was a 10-day student excursion to Denmark in April.
“My passion’s agriculture, and we wanted to make sure that the students weren’t going to go to a cookie-cutter tourism type of trip, so we focused on agriculture,” Collins said.
The trip included visiting two colleges that taught agriculture.
“We got to see a robotic dairy [farm], we got to see a robotic feeding system, where robots come into the barn, feed the cattle, go back to their facility and mix the feed, and then it comes back in,” Collins. “It does it like 14 times a day, and they were the only college in that country that does that.”
The group saw grapeseed farming and shipping of plant cuttings, as well as wind-powered turbines.
Collins noted other things Denmark does, such as having kids in high school choose if they want to go to college at age 16, no driver’s licenses until they turn 18 and it costs $3,000 (American), free health care and a tax rate of 42%.
“And then they are probably predominantly 70% electric vehicles, and they are almost 90% renewable energy, so they’re really not dependent on petroleum at all,” Collins said. “It is wind and solar power that runs their country…There’s no landfills. They do tons of recycling. They’re one of the top producers in the world for hog production, and [Denmark] is a third the size of North Carolina.”
This fall, the Franklin High FFA students will take on new challenges. The biggest one is showing beef heifers at multiple county fairs, including Macon County’s in September, before the state fair in October.
“Through that continued passion, they decided to take it to the next level with the beef heifers,” Collins said of her FFA students, of which nine will show beef heifers. All have previous experience showing dairy heifers.
Beef heifers show longer than dairy heifers, going from the start of July through October, compared to a two-week window with dairy heifers.
“Showing beef is a little bit different than dairy,” Collins explained. “And so they have to have a different tool to be able to show them and to learn how to use that tool appropriately to set up their animal and train them.”
Collins complimented the FFA students’ work during the summer, saying it shows “a sense of responsibility and dedication and enjoyment for wanting to be with these animals.”
“I think it’s awesome that they’re able to do that and they wouldn’t be doing it if they didn’t have a passion for it,” Collins said.
Along with showing heifers, FFA’s forest competition practice started this month.
“Last year we were second in the state for the forestry, and so that’s the highest we’ve been in years,” Collins said. “So we’re hoping to continue that.”
Collins and FFA will have to deal with their on-campus facility being demolished this fall as part of the planned new FHS project, so the work will be in mobile classrooms.
“My hope is to still be able to do as much hands-on in our labs to continue with that excitement about agriculture as we’ve been able to do in the past and be able to just encourage these kiddos,” Collins said.