Fort Worth Magazine
Audrey Bishop stands by her agriscience project, in every sense of the word, at the Fort Worth Convention Center.
The Future Farmers of America, better known by its acronym, “FFA,” is in town this week for its annual convention, as if busses from the state’s outer reaches stocking the lots around the Fort Worth Convention Center didn’t give it away.
Ag students from Athens, Hondo, El Campo (mascot: Ricebirds), Gonzales, San Perlita, Shiner, and Stamford, among many, many others are here. The total number of FFA students is more than 11,000 strong, according to organizers, all with polish on their boots, all of them roaming an expansive convention center exhibits hall in between presentations and a variety of activities and competitions.
The 94th convention is back in Fort Worth. (A little birdie whispered to me that, ahem, the convention does better here than at the other major city of DFW. Better attendance and better sponsorships. Of course, two years pandemic interruptions and convention adaptations didn’t help.) The Cowtown Coliseum hosted the FFA Rodeo.
That Ag Quiz Bowl was an item that jumped right off the itinerary, like a deer hopping a fence.
Teams of four went one-on-one, all vying for two places in the finals.
San Antonio East Central, which had to pull up two freshmen to the senior team, defeated Rusk in the senior finals.
Anything within the Principles of Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources textbook was fair game.
For example: What is a young female bovine called that has not borne a calf?
“It was really cool we were able to win with two freshmen,” says Jordan Hevner, a third-year FFA teacher at East Central. “All my team members answered questioned equally. It was really a pretty even effort.”
Leadership workshops are another feature of the convention, and I ran across two young women who could have led a few of those workshops.
Madison Perkins, a senior-to-be at Gilmer High School, and a just-graduated Audrey Bishop of Van Alstyne won their respective divisions in the agriscience fair.
This is where the deep thinkers who have questions and uncover answers reside.
“You’ve probably never heard of Van Alstyne,” Miss Bishop says. I assure her that I had heard of it and, in fact, list off neighboring Anna and Grayson County seat Sherman to show off my geography chops.
“Well, I’ve never actually been to Van Alstyne, but I’ve driven through it,” I correct.
“If you’ve driven through it, you’ve seen it,” Bishop assures me.
Perkins’ studied 20 ponds in and around her Gilmer neighborhood to see if fertilizer and feces had an effect on water quality and biodiversity readings in those ponds. She had read that there were 2,500 miles of untested water sources in Texas, so, “I wanted to do my part of 20 ponds just to lower that number.”
She plans on testing more.
“I found that it changes the water quality because it changes the dissolved oxygen,” says Perkins, who plans to attend Texas A&M after graduating next year to study poultry science. “Dissolved oxygen is a very crucial water quality measure. However, it did not affect the biodiversity readings.”
Bishop’s project was a continuation of one started after her freshman year of high school.
It’s all related to the affects of antibiotics on plant growth and crop yield.
She found there is an impact, a negative impact, on the antibiotics released into the ecosystem.
She changed directions this year with the examination, doing more of a social systems project, looking at the farmers’ perception and behavior related to soil health, testing, and chemical fertilizers. She hopes to turn what she found into an “educational campaign to use for agriculturalists and consumers so they can become more aware of the problem antibiotics are causing.”
In the fall, Bishop, who was also a finalist in extemporaneous and prepared public speaking, will enroll as a freshman at Oklahoma State with plans for a double major in plant and soil science, and environmental science.
Writing legislation is her goal.
There’s no reason to think she won’t achieve that or whatever else she aspires to. Both Perkins and Bishop now head to the national judging.
These young agriculturalists are working off a strong base. The future is looking up with the FFA.
(P.S. The answer is heifer. What is a young female bovine called that has not borne a calf?)