I am very, very interested in Agriculture. I live on a farm a few miles west of Tulare, SD and I am pretty clear on what I want to do after high school. A big part of my Agricultural life is being active in the FFA. Fall of 2015, my classmates and I judged Land in Wessington Springs for our district contest. Three of my classmates and I made the land judging team that received first! This meant we got a trip to Oklahoma for the National Land Judging Contest in April. For those of you who don't know how a land judging contest goes, I'll give you a brief overview. First, you have to determine the subsoil and topsoil. This means you have to choose if the dirt is really sandy or very clayey or feels sticky. Then, you have to determine factors, such as permeability, flooding, slope, erosion, etc. And I am sorry to you who think this is boring, because this is very interesting to me and it is something I am passionate about. :) Anyway, there are many more things to fill out on the card, but you get the idea. So, in April, all four of us, including our advisor and two other people from Redfield, SD, got in a vehicle and drove to Oklahoma. Altogether, I think the drive took about 8 hours, counting stops at Brahm's Dairy, of course! I'm pretty sure we ate at Brahm's every meal of every day we were there, which was a seven day trip if I remember right! While we were there, we practiced so much in the hot, humid weather with all different kinds of people from all different states! Even though while we were there it felt like all we did was judge and practice, looking back we got to do a lot of fun things! We got to tour the Oklahoma City Bombing Site, which was, by far, the most interesting thing we got to do, in my opinion.

Oklahoma City Bombing Site Memorial Wall

Three of us at the bombing site

parking meter at bombing site

 We also got to tour LazyE Horse Ranch, we visited the horse races, and toured the Cowboy Hall of Fame, which is where the awards ceremony was held. At the awards ceremony, we ate a very nice meal and then they started going through all the different categories of judging. Our division was up and my name got called to go up on stage! I placed 4th individual out of about 400. Our team placed second, which was pretty good for a little South Dakota town of about 200 people.

Bringing home the hardware!

We came home and were praised by all! It was so much fun, and I loved the state of Oklahoma. Even though we had some excitement along the way, such as the local exotic zoo had stopped by and told us they had a black panther loose! Despite all of the hard work and late nights, I would do it all again in a heartbeat.