Team Ag Ed

About two weeks ago the Iowa FFA Foundation held their annual golf tournament for sponsors. This year it was a GREAT success! Our role as state officers was to help out in any way possible. To do this we:

1. Helped with registration and sold mulligans
2. Mingled and got to know our sponsors on a personal level
3. Helped run a live auction during the banquet

This was a GREAT experience and opportunity to CONNECT with businessmen and industries that directly work with agriculture today.

Iowa's State Officers at NLCSO with National FFA Officers Tiffany and Riley.

Our next event was National Leadership Conference for State Officers (NLCSO). It was an honor to hold this great event for the state officers from Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, Kansas, and of course, Iowa. This conference helped us develop and hone in on the qualities it takes to successfully advocate and lead our state to a better understanding of agriculture. Rodd Whitney of Monsanto enlightened us with the major issues of agriculture today in a very interesting and engaging way.

Here are a few notes that I jotted down throughout the week.

*Henry Groseclose= THE FATHER OF AGRICULTURE

*Agricultural Education can happen without the FFA, but the FFA can NOT happen without Agricultural Education.

*There are more agricultural production farmers in China than there are people in the U.S.
-(But those 400 million farmers in China only have 9% of the worlds workable soil to produce on... While the US has 28% of the worlds workable soil)

*Every time you go to sleep, by the time you wake up in the morning, there are 210,000 more mouths to feed.

*The #1 issue in agriculture today is FEEDING THE WORLD.

Iowa FFA State Officers working with State Officers from other states.

This past week has been a GREAT time and we have all taken back many VALUABLE memories that we can carry with us during our time of service to the FFA and even after our period is over. Thank you everyone for making this a great week. Lets go Team Ag Ed. Agricultural education is the base for the FFA. Agriculture is important and necessary to FEED THE WORLD. Go out and be advocates for LIFE. Peace out FFA. BELIEVE. -Steven Brockshus

NW District Leadership Conference

Last week we had our Northwest District Leadership Conference! It was a BLAST! To get ready for it, the day before, our district officer team met and we talked things out. We discussed how things would run and what materials we would all need. Then we made a "quick", fun Walmart trip for supplies and supper. Then we set up all the rooms and went back to Mr. Weber's house. We also went to his school and picked up our district T-shirts and polo's! Mr. Weber then grilled us some delicious burgers- THANKS!

That night we discussed curriculum and facilitating tips. We played an amazing game of Apples to Apples and had a fun time with it! When the other state officers, Sarah, Nicole, and Michael arrived, we talked and talked and talked about FFA and life. We discussed how the other district's DLCs went and some more hints and tips to be successful.

The next morning we all got up nice and early, cleaned and had breakfast, then headed off to DLC to finish setting up and be ready. We got there about 45 minutes before registration started and hung up posters, set up tables, and took additional supplies to the rooms.

At about 8:00, members and advisors started rolling in. We had a great turn out and a variety of people show up and have a great time! We had Dan from the foundation present for one of the workshops. The advisors also had a workshop with Mr. Weber and went on a tour of Dordt College. The district officers split up with one state officer to facilitate one workshop the entire day. In the morning the state officer did more of the presenting and as the day went on our district officers stepped up and did the facilitating! It was great to see how much everyone grew and increased their participation throughout the day. THANKYOU to EVERYONE who attended DLC this year for making it a fun experience for everyone. I truly appreciate your cooperation and involvement!

Throughout the day members from across the district met new people and made new friends. Each chapter discovered new activities they could do to get their chapter members more involved. They also came up with a chapter mission statement and several SMART goals. It was fun to see what members had for ideas of how to improve the FFA. It was also great to see discussion of what we could do for some district wide fun day activities!

A thanks goes out to Dordt College for providing us with outstanding facilities and great meal! Also, thank you to all the state officers who helped the day run smoothly; Sarah, Nicole, and Michael. Thank you Mr. Weber for guiding us through this, providing a home for the night and also a delicious meal. Thank you members for attending and making it a GREAT day! I would like to give a special SHOUT OUT to all of our district officers, Cassie, Caroline, Josh, Shelby, and Marshall for stepping up, believing in youselves, and doing the right thing to impact others. It was fun to see you take over the workshops, facilitate, and lead the members. You are all doing great things and have made many lasting memories with FFA members throughout the district. Without you, our DLC would be nothing. THANKS!

Be sure to CHECK OUT our district webpage and our *new* FACEBOOK page! Please post any ideas for chapter activities, chapter goals, district goals, and district wide activities that we could do. The more ideas we have, the faster we can improve and the more fun we can have as a district. Thanks! Peace out FFA! BELIEVE.

Using Graphic Design Skills to SERVE

Seeing that I am going to school this following year for graphic design, I have taken it upon my self to meet the designing needs for the Iowa FFA. The first thing I designed for the FFA (besides on the chapter level) was our T-shirt for the NW district. The revealing of these will be at District Leadership Conference this Friday!

The next thing I designed was our state officer business cards. The plain old white ones are classy- but we decided to spice things up a bit and do the old switch-er-roo. I designed seven different styles and types of business cards. Then I sent them out in a Google Doc to my fellow state officers for a vote... and wallah! Now I am in the process of putting in people's information and sending them out to Shaniel to be printed!

The latest and most challenging task I took up was to design a 'logo' for this year's theme... BELIEVE. Being in the state of Iowa (and a Cyclones fan) the first idea that popped into my head was to make a logo that is somewhat based off of the current Iowa State logo. This presented a major challenge. I wanted it to be the same font and everything. I tried taking an easy and less creative approach to this task. After several hours of research and frustration, I realized that the font was made 'in-house' and was not available to the public. At this point I almost scratched the project all together.

The next day I thought I looked at things in a more positive manner and thought I would take a different approach to the same task. Using multiple designing programs, I got creative and went away towards my goal. Once again, I was excited to tackle this project. I got a bit carried away and designed 13 variations of a logo for our theme BELIEVE. Once again, I sent it out to all of our state officers for a vote.

At this point I received something that I did not expect. A suggestion from another state officer to make the logo even better. This got me extremely excited, because I had never thought of it. I quickly went at it and within minutes I had e-mailed out two new designs. Needless to say, our final design turned out LEGIT!

I just sent out the final design, so be looking for it on many various objects throughout the year, especially on our semi-trucks that we sell! Thank you everyone for your input and support!

Being able to put my skills and abilities to use for something greater than my self is an honor. I very much enjoy designing things of various sorts and I am thankful for the many opportunities to do so for the state of Iowa. Thank you FFA. Peace out. BELIEVE.

Communication Training

So- the next 'major' event we had as state officers was communication training! This was much more 'relaxed' (if you could call it that) than BLAST Off Training. During this training we met as an officer team and talked about everything going down for the summer and how we are going to tackle it. We also met with the Iowa FFA Foundation and learned the ins and outs of how it all works. Then we took on the task of completely re-constructing District Leadership Conference curriculum. With the help of Randy, we learned many useful skills on how to facilitate a workshop. He also gave us the best constructive criticism to help improve DLC. This took waaaaaaay longer than anticipated, but I am so glad that we worked together as a team and used everyone's ideas to (*hopefully*) make this a success!

During this week we also learned proper dinner etiquette. This was a very interesting experience. Who knew that you are supposed to eat french fries with a fork!? Or how about eat fruit with a spoon? Or my favorite, when eating soup, scoop it up pushing the spoon away from your body, then tilt the spoon upward and 'sip' the soup. When doing this one, I probably learned more ways to spill it on myself, the table cloth, and all over my face than how to actually 'properly' eat the soup.

After learning proper etiquette, we got to put our new skills to use first hand while meeting the Alumni for the first time. It was great to see so many people supporting us in everything we do. It's nice to know that someone's got our back.

That wrapped up our Communication Training, but I stayed at the Enrichment Center another night with Lindsay and Patrick (I just realized that I have forgotten to introduce you to our 2011-2012 state officer team, so we've got Lindsay, Sarah, Nicole, Logan, Patrick, Michael, and Marshal! And me of course!). This night we stuffed thank you letters for our many wonderful sponsors of the 2011 State Leadership Convention. We also had many deep conversations and fun bonding moments :).

The next day Patrick made me a wonderful breakfast of toast and eggs on a skillet. Then I was on the road to a meeting with a potential sponsor for the NW district's T-shirts. After that I rode back to my home-town school, boarded a bus, and journeyed off for our FFA chapter's Jr./Sr. Trip. Now I'm happily blogging from Orlando, FL. "We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." Walt Disney. Peace out FFA! BELIEVE.

SLCDO & BLAST Off Training

Two weeks after being elected to state office, I had my first 'training'. This was State Leadership Conference for District Officers. Being the state vice president automatically makes me the NW district president (if you didn't understand how that works). This conference was run by the 'Has-Been' state officers, in other words- last years officers. This was extremely fun and filled with many learning opportunities! One of my favorite things was getting to meet so many new people. We all worked together on the ropes course to achieve one common goal. This showed us the importance of teamwork, leadership, and compensation. For the two days we were going at it, we all hung up paper-bag mailboxes for anyone to put a personal message in. After the conference, I enjoyed reading every one of these and I filled my cubicle with them!

After SLCDO, I was introduced to the state officer suite! This is a place in the FFA Enrichment Center where there is a cubicle office space for every state officer. There are also housing quarters with nice little 'army-cot' beds that are about 3 inches thick (yet surprisingly comfy). I decorated my cubicle with sticky notes (I love sticky notes), motivational quotes and other various items to make it 'home'.

The very next day, all of us state officers started our BLAST Off Training with Ryan, Becky and Shane! We started on the first afternoon with various workshops that went late into the night. This first day was a bit overwhelming, but I enjoyed learning so many new things! As the week went on, it was hard to get a grasp on how much we had actually learned, but looking back in review, all of it is extremely important and essential to serve our state. We created our own life mission statements to build our life off of. We also developed personal leadership statements, which defined what we believe leadership to be. Another major thing we did was set personal SMART goals. These will be very beneficial to help us grow throughout the year (One of my SMART goals was to actually start a blog!). Throughout this entire week of high-impact intensive training, we learned how to build influence by how we carry ourselves and represent our state through the FFA. This entire week, I believe we, as a state officer team, grew to know each other better than anyone who had only known each other for a short amount of time. Because of the work of Ryan, Becky, and Shane, we have started to unlock our potential to make a difference in the lives of others. Other human beings. Other FFA members. As advocates for agriculture, we need to use our passion, heart, care, integrity, hard work, and desire to SERVE the members and advance agriculture and the FFA. Peace out FFA! BELIEVE.

State Office Elections

When I was elected to state office, I was really excited! I think it’s a great honor to be in a position to serve others throughout the state! Growing up on a family dairy farm, I have been around agriculture and I see how it can impact others.

Going back a few months ago when I told my father I was running for a state office, he was surprised. He served as a state officer back in 1992-1993. He knew I have always been busy, but never thought I would run for state office. He said that it was a real busy time, but you meet new people and build relationships that you wouldn’t be able to build anywhere else in the world. Going into the interview process all he said was to be personable and be yourself.

The 'extensive' election process at the state leadership conference included a test about FFA knowledge, a one-on-one talk with each member of the nominating committee, a group presentation to show how well each of us candidates worked together in a team situation, and five questions additional questions in front of the judges. After completing this process, two candidates for each office were placed on the ballot. Since no one else from the NW district ran, I was balloted unopposed. After all of this, I presented a two-minute speech to delegates of the NW district about integrity. Then I was asked two questions and had one minute to answer each one. This was a little nerve wracking, but I went at it confidently and just went with it.

The only advice I have for anyone applying or interviewing for anything is to just to be yourself and be honest.

My background is that I live on a fifth-generation dairy farm located just two miles south of the Iowa/Minnesota state line. I have three brothers and no sisters. We milk a 400-cow herd of Holsteins in a modified stanchion-parlor barn.

This next year I will be attending Iowa State University to study graphic design.

I look forward to serving the Iowa FFA Association, and ALL the members! You can always get a hold of me for anything you need at sbrockshus@iowaffa.com. Peace out FFA! BELIEVE. 6.2.11