At the Madison FFA Chapter, the Livestock Evaluation CDE is a big deal. Every year our advisor would start the first practices around November and we would go hard until contest time. We would show up rockin’ our blue blazer and spittin’ some mad reasons. Somehow, however, I missed the bandwagon on this one. I never took the opportunity to attend the Livestock Judging CDE in high school, so just imagine how excited I was to welcome in almost 150 Junior and Senior teams to the event! The day was full of surprises. I got to drive Beverly’s beast of a truck, honked Katie’s Duke’s of Hazzard horn and got to see a lot of FFA members I hadn’t seen in a while!
It always amazes me who you run into at some of our state’s events. There are those we are just getting to meet for the first time, standing in line for barbeque, getting psyched to give a set of reasons, or a few middle schoolers there just to try and figure out what the contest is all about! Then, there are those members we haven’t seen in awhile. Maybe they were in our small group at SLC, competed in a contest earlier in the year or we were lucky enough to come to there school during FFA week! And still again, there would be some members our team had just spent all weekend with at MEGA, we were getting to see them that day, and we would see later that week at Land Judging! No matter what, it was a good day to connect! Especially since we don’t play a big role in the activities until it’s time to round up score cards.
Since we weren’t tied up with judging until the end of the day, that meant the rest of the time we weren’t running errand for event staff, we had to find our own entertainment. Earlier I mentioned the excitement of running into old friends we haven’t seen in awhile; I ran into a few of my own. Somehow, three girls who were in my small group at White Lake ended up in the same rotation group. After they finished their reasons, we laughed and giggled waiting for the next rotation, but we also devised a diabolical plot. We had a vision of starting a wave all around the arena! FFA members going crazy! Blasting music over the intercom! However, the reality of this being a cut-throat competition, beat us back into our seats, where we continued to quietly visit so that we would not disturb anyone...
In just a short matter of time, the rotation ended and it was time for my friends to move on. I waved them TTFN and it was time find more fun stuff to do. I migrated to the center of the arena, where I found most of my team standing with our interns and two very special guests, two national officers. Jason and Seth had been with us for about a week now, so they had become part of our family. They both shared stories of their year of service that inspired us to keep pushing to make everyday of ours better, but mostly they made us laugh. Our whole team was very fortunate to have spent time with two such wonderful people and can’t wait until we can see our friends again someday.
Throughout our state officer year, there have been a lot of comings and goings, hellos to new people and good-byes to old friends; many connections have been made. Though the Livestock CDE is about applying the technical skills as well as the life skills we have been able to learn in our agriculture classrooms, for me March 27, 2012 was all about coming together as FFA members and connecting at one of organization’s oldest contest that helped start it all!
Respectfully Submitted,
Alyssa Ramsey
North Carolina FFA Association
State Vice President 2011-2012
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