National FFA Members Head to Washington, D.C., for Washington Leadership Conference

Jun 07, 2023

For more than 50 years, thousands of FFA members from across the country have converged in our nation’s capital each summer to engage with legislators, hone civic engagement and leadership skills, and create community impact projects to take back to their cities and towns.

The National FFA Organization’s Washington Leadership Conference (WLC) will take place from June 6-July 22 at the Omni Shoreham, with six weeklong sessions for FFA members to choose from. More than 2,000 FFA members from throughout the country are expected to attend the 2023 conference, the second-largest student experience that National FFA hosts each year, only behind the National FFA Convention & Expo that draws more than 70,000 attendees.

FFA members will spend the week under the guidance of agricultural and leadership professionals, facilitators, and FFA staff who will guide them through workshops, seminars, small group activities, and visits to national landmarks such as the National Mall, Arlington National Cemetery, Smithsonian Museums, and the U.S. Capitol. Each day of the conference focuses on a different principle taught through the context of our nation’s capital: exploration, encouragement, advocacy and service.

FFA members will have the unique opportunity to participate in congressional visits during the week with legislators from their states. Members can share concerns and challenges from their communities and discuss agricultural-related legislation.

Living to ServeThe capstone of the conference is the development of a Living to Serve Plan, a civic engagement project that participants will implement in their communities after returning home.

To develop this Living to Serve Plan, members are asked to analyze the needs of their communities before attending WLC. Students can lean on their FFA chapter advisors to implement the plan upon returning home. Examples of projects in recent years include promoting agricultural literacy, bringing attention to abuse, collecting and distributing shoes to individuals in Haiti, and creating a hunger awareness plan.

WLC Living to Serve Success Stories

Nadia Walker, an officer of the Nicholas County FFA in the Licking River Region in Kentucky, attended WLC in the summer of 2022. During her time in Washington, D.C., she created her Living to Serve Plan around establishing a food pantry after her community was hit by a devastating flood, the worst natural disaster to hit the area in recorded history.

"I always knew I wanted to make a difference, but I never truly knew how,” says Walker. “When I attended WLC, I saw that even I could make a change. After attending WLC, The Hive Pantry came to life.”

Walker’s pantry was placed in the lowest income area of the county and prioritized providing nutritional, preservable food.

Another student who attended WLC in 2022 was Natalee Bray, an officer of the Pike Valley FFA in Kansas. Her Living to Serve Plan was to create a Safety Day with her local elementary school in partnership with Progressive Ag, where she taught more than 150 students about agricultural and farm safety.

The 2023 Washington Leadership Conference is sponsored by Merck Animal Health, Syngenta, Farm Credit, PepsiCo, Rabo AgriFinance and Growth Energy. For more information, visit FFA.org/WLC.

The National FFA Organization is a school-based national youth leadership development organization of more than 850,000 student members as part of 8,995 local FFA chapters in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Source : National FFA

Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”