Last week the Friday Footnote focused on the Kentucky Future Farmer Cooperative which was a statewide cooperative with FFA chapters as members. It was started in 1943 but appears to have stopped operating around 1948. So did this mean the end of chapter cooperative activities and education about agricultural cooperatives in Kentucky? Not by a long shot!
Would it surprise you to learn there is a competitive activity in Kentucky today known as AIC. AIC is the acronym for the American Institute of Cooperatives. There is competition at the regional and state levels. At the regional level each FFA chapter can enter one member in the competition. The regional winner advances to the state competition.
At one time the state winner and runner up received an expense-paid trip to the American Institute of Cooperatives Conference in the summer. The rules for the competition are below.
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Regional AIC Competition |
State AIC Competition |
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The resources for this competition can be found at https://kyffa.org/system/ckeditor_assets/attachments/929/AIC_Resources.pdf.
So how well do you think you would score on the cooperative exam? You might get some idea by going to the American Institute of Cooperatives KY FFA CDE Quizlet.
The AIC competitive event in Kentucky started in 1974 and continues until today. If you go to the Kentucky FFA website and click on the Career Development and Leadership Development events (CDES & LDES) link you will find that AIC (American Institute of Cooperatives) is the first event listed.
SpotLight on Two Kentucky AIC Winning Students
An article titled “Hard Work Pays Off for Senior at Lone Oak” in the Paducah (KY) Sun from August 7, 1984 does a good job of describing the AIC activity. The first part of the article reads:
Supply-and-demand theory, preferred stock and cooperative ownership are rarely subjects of high school students’ leisure reading. But for Mark Nelson, a senior at Lone Oak High, hitting the books brought an unusual report card: an expense paid week in Montana. Nelson won the state “AIC” contest for Future Farmers of America in June. The program encourages students to learn about the free-enterprise system, with an emphasis on the role of cooperatives in the economic lives of farmers and other consumers.
Read the article in Figure 1 for more information.
Figure 1. The Paducah Sun, August 7, 1984
Pam Brinkley wrote an article in June of 1978 for The Messenger, a newspaper in Madisonville, KY. The title of the article was “How I, a girl, became a top Future Farmer.” The first sentence in the article reads “I got involved in Future Farmers of America in my freshman year in high school when, because my schedule was messed up, I took a Vocational Agriculture class…”. What an inauspicious way to start the journey in agricultural education for a student who would eventually become the first female state FFA Officer in Kentucky in 1979.
In The Messenger article she wrote:
But the greatest thing of all that happened to me recently transpired, coming to a climax at the 49th Kentucky State FFA Convention…It began when I was selected as one of the two members to represent our chapter on the regional level in the American Institute of Cooperatives Test…I was selected as the regional first place winner…On June 7, I took the state test and it was announced that night I was the state winner, would receive a $100 savings bond and an expense paid trip to Bozeman, Montana to represent the Kentucky Association of FFA along with the second, third, and fourth place state winners at the National conference of the A.I.C., July 31-August 3.
To learn more about Pam see Figure 2.
Figure 2. The Messenger, Madisonville, KY, June 29, 1978
The AIC competition in Kentucky continues to the present time. There are numerous newspaper articles in Kentucky about students who have won the AIC competition at various levels of competition.
What Cooperative Related Activities Preceded AIC in Kentucky?
As far back as 1921 students in Kentucky were writing essays about cooperative marketing. The Kentucky Tobacco Campaign Committee held an essay writing contest for high school students in the Burley Belt of the state. The essays were on Tobacco Cooperative Marketing. The winning student received $20 in gold. The winning essay in 1922, “Why Father Should Sign the Tobacco Contract,” was written by Jasper Shannon of Carlisle, Kentucky and is reproduced in Figure 3.
Figure 3. The Watchman and Southron, Sumter, SC. February 22, 1922.
Note: Southron is not misspelled. It means “a person from the south.” It was originally used by Scots.
In 1926 the Louisville Courier-Journal sponsored a “co-operative marketing essay contest.” The Department of Education in Frankfort endorsed the contest that was designed to promote interest in co-operative marketing and was open to all students in Kentucky who were attending schools where agriculture was being taught. The state was divided into six districts for the contest with the winner in each district receiving $10 with the state winner receiving $50 (The Courier-Journal, Louisville, February 17, 1926.)
During the 1940s the Producers Livestock Marketing Association gave out Livestock Cooperative Awards to three FFA members in Kentucky who had outstanding accomplishments in livestock farming. One of the criteria used in the selection was “Cooperative efforts engaged in such as buying, selling, and financing” (F.F.A. Activities in Kentucky’s Program of Vocational Agriculture 1943-44).
Bittersweet Concluding Remarks
For decades the American Institute of Cooperatives hosted rural youth, particularly 4-H, Future Homemakers of America, and the Future Farmers at their summer conference. This event was held at various locations. In 1952 it was at Michigan State, in 1956 North Carolina State, in 1959 1,200 4-H and FFA members attended at the University of Illinois, Ohio State was the host in 1962, Virginia State University hosted in 1976, Montana State University was the host in 1984, Utah State was the host in 2001, and Colorado State hosted in 2003.
In researching this Footnote I attempted to contact the American Institute of Cooperatives. A Google search failed to produce a website for the organization. A phone call to the number listed in a USDA bulletin was not in service. An email and phone message to a person with a connection to AIC was not returned. The winner of the AIC competition in Kentucky now receives a plaque instead of a trip. It appears the American Institute of Cooperatives has gone out of business. That is sad.
I discovered that at least two other states currently have competitive events focused on agricultural cooperatives. California has a Marketing CDE which focuses on cooperatives and Oregon has a Coop Quiz CDE. There could be other states of which I am not aware. The description of the California Marketing CDE is:
The Marketing event seeks to effectively prepare the students with the practices and operations of Agricultural Cooperatives. Workers seeking careers in cooperative marketing must not only develop a high degree of knowledge and skill they must also develop the ability to solve difficult problems. This event blends the testing of manipulative skills and knowledge required for careers in operations and marketing.
A number of states have had co-op quiz competitions in the past. A search of newspapers.com using the search terms “co-op quiz” + 4H + FFA yielded 365 matches. The earliest match was in Virginia in 1948 (see Figure 4). Other states with co-op quizzes at some point in time for 4-H or FFA members include Washington, Utah, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, New York, and Maine.
Figure 4. The Daily News Leader, Staunton, VA, May 26, 1948.
In some locations agricultural cooperatives are alive and well. In other locations they may not be as important as they once were. Regardless, we should make sure our students have a basic understanding of cooperatives and how they work.