FFA holds tight to roots, Celina Record

Celina FFA holds tight to agricultural roots Lisa Ferguson, lferguson@starlocalmedia.com Jan 7, 2016 For the Standridge family, as well as others in Celina, being members of the local FFA chapter is practically in their DNA. Back in the day, Celina High School graduates Cassidy (class of 2000) and Carrie Standridge (2003) showed animals at various livestock events throughout the state as part of the school’s FFA chapter. These days the couple’s sons, Zane, 11, and Ethan, 8, are members of the city’s Junior FFA chapter, which is open to students in third- through eighth-grade. With their parents’ help, they regularly show several of the family’s half-dozen pigs. FFA is “the best thing to ever happen” to their family, Carrie said earlier this week as the foursome prepped pig pens at the Myers Park & Event Center Show Barn in McKinney, where the boys competed in this year’s Collin County Junior Livestock Show. The event runs through Saturday. As Celina continues to grow toward a more urban future, however, some FFA supporters have expressed concerns that the local chapter’s membership numbers and community interest in the program could dwindle. “Just with the growth and the different people (moving) into town, we have the big-city people that have never heard of” FFA, Carrie said. Dennis Shinpaugh, a 1980 Celina High graduate, showed cattle as an FFA member during his years at the school. He now serves as president of the nonprofit Celina FFA Alumni Association, which supports and raises funds for the local chapter. “We’re just trying to keep it going and keep it growing,” he said. Shinpaugh, whose daughter Taylor, 14, breeds and shows goats with FFA, said he’s concerned for the organization’s future in Celina. “The more residential (development) that moves in, the less (open) space people will have for their animals,” he explained. “On the positive side, a lot of people that have moved in have come to our meetings,” he said. “They’re first-time people that have never dealt with livestock in the past, but they want to get involved with livestock and their kids want to get into livestock.” During the 2014-2015 school year, there were more than 108,000 FFA members in Texas – an increase of over 5,400 members from the previous year, according to Kristy Meyer, communications director for the National FFA Organization, based in Indianapolis. While the letters “FFA” stand for Future Farmers of America, the organization’s name was updated to an acronym in 1998 to reflect the growing diversity of the agriculture industry. FFA’s membership numbers are also climbing across the country, Meyer said. “We’re having some (school chapters) in urban areas that we haven’t had before, but we’re still maintaining those chapters that are more traditional as well. “I think the important thing to remember, and what we really note with our membership, is that agriculture is a really diverse field,” with more than 300 careers that can fall under an agriculture job description, she said. “There’s a lot of opportunities for students. While you still have your production agriculture, you might (also) have something different, like aquaculture or food sciences or veterinary medicine. So things that you might not have traditionally thought of as being agriculture … are agriculture-related and intersect,” Meyer explained. That’s the lesson Shannon Layman said he attempts to impart on his students at Celina High, where he has been an agriculture teacher and the FFA advisor for two decades. He estimated that about 200 students are enrolled in agriculture classes at the school, which they must take to participate in FFA. “I want kids to know how important agriculture is to our society, to our world,” Layman said. “We can live without knowing how to read and write, add and subtract, but we cannot live if we can’t feed the people in this world.” In keeping with educational trends, Layman said much of what he teaches involves project-based learning and even highlights visual arts. “Kids do things with their hands and that helps hopefully create some of those critical-thinking skills when they have to take care of an animal or they have to build something,” he said. “If we’re looking at building a gate … some of the concepts they teach them in art class – depth and symmetry and balance – there is an art that goes into that. … Geometry and algebra come into play when they’re doing some of the calculations they have to do to build stuff.” While there are fewer farmers across the nation than in generations past, Layman said, “They’re doing more with less, and I think that’s a big testament for American agriculture. I want to try to instill those ideas into my students, and I want them to understand that to me, agriculture … is the most diversified field of study in the world.” Kyle Strickland, a Celina High senior, has been involved with FFA for a few years. He showed his pigs, named Silverado and Chaos, earlier this week at the livestock show. The 18-year-old, who said he dreams of becoming a veterinarian, believes the local FFA chapter is growing in popularity with teens. “You drive through Celina and most of it is farmland, and a lot farmers (have) their kids coming through,” he said, “so it helps them get ready whether they continue working (in the industry) with their parents or branch off on their own thing.”