Arizona was the 33rd state to affiliate with the National FFA in 1929. Today, there are 80+ FFA chapters in Arizona. The Arizona application for their 1929 charter is located at this web site. The Arizona FFA website is https://www.azffa.org/.
A search of Newspapers.com finds 10,372 matches for the phrase “Future Farmers of America” in Arizona newspapers. It is interesting looking at the decades in which the articles appeared:
- 1920s – 13
- 1930s – 1,972
- 1940s – 1,788
- 1950s – 2,158
- 1960s – 1,810
- 1970s – 1,039
- 1980s – 640
- 1990s – 339
- 2000s – 449
- 2010s – 141
- 2020s – 17
What do these numbers tell us? I have several ideas. Let’s examine some of the articles.
Chicken Dinner Given Classes By Instructor – The Arizona Republican (Phoenix), October 28, 1928
What better way to organize a FFA chapter than to invite the agriculture students to the home of the agriculture teacher and feed them a chicken dinner. That is exactly what Mark Bliss, the vo-ag instructor at Peoria High School did. As a result Peoria became the first FFA chapter in Arizona in 1928. See Figure 1.
Figure 1. The Arizona Republican, October 28, 1928
Future Farmers of America – The Arizona Republican (Phoenix), November 17, 1929
Having a recurring column about the FFA seems to have been a standard practice for The Arizona Republican (also at times identified as the Arizona Republic newspaper). The column for November 17, 1929 reveals that Arizona had grown to nine FFA chapters in a year. It was also announced the state fair would have a FFA division next year but no boy “will be allowed to compete both as a 4-H club and Future Farmer member.“ See Figure 2. The issue of competing as a 4-H member or FFA member was discussed in a past Friday Footnote.
Figure 2. The Arizona Republican, November 17, 1929
FFA Organizes 10-Steer Club – Arizona Daily Star, January 6, 1943
During World War II FFA chapters across the country engaged in numerous activities to produce more food and collect scarce war materials. What the FFA did was described in a past Friday Footnote. However, in working on this Footnote I discovered another war time activity that was new to me. The Arizona students responded to the need for more meat by establishing “Ten Steer Clubs”. So I learned something new. The Farm Journal and Country Gentleman (Volume 67, p. 34) reported that Arizona FFA members had established ten steer clubs to aid in the war effort. See Figure 3 to learn more yourself.
Figure 3. Arizona Daily Star, January 6, 1943
Amphi Future Farmers Win U.S. Honors for Third Year – Tucson Daily Citizen, October 13, 1954
The FFA chapter at Amphitheater was recognized as a national gold emblem chapter for their program of work. They had formed an in-school bank that lent $7,000 to students for projects, established a cooperative chicken hatching program, conducted farm safety activities, and did insect spraying for the community. See Figure 4.
Figure 4. Tucson Daily Citizen, October 13, 1954
The phrase in the previous paragraph “conducted farm safety activities” is a rather anemic way to describe what the chapter did. An article in the Arizona Daily Star a year earlier (October 15, 1953) described the farm safety activities of the chapter. “Be Accident Free in ‘53” was the slogan for the 1953 safety campaign. Safety stickers saying “Courtesy is Contagious” were placed on car windshields in the community. FFA members made safety inspections of farms and tagged 480 hazards (the hazard tags were red with a skull and crossbones on them). A later check showed that 92 percent of the hazards had been corrected. Movies emphasizing farm safety were shown in the vo-ag classes and there were two school assembly programs on safety. A school safety survey was conducted. Letters, newspaper stories and radio programs were prepared by the students.
Figure 5. Photo from the Tucson Daily Citizen, February 16, 1952
It appears the FFA members at Amphitheater took farm safety seriously. Safety programs and community development activities were emphasized by the Amphitheater FFA for decades.
In case you are curious, Amphitheater High School, which was established in 1939, got its name from the five mountain ranges surrounding the Tucson area. The mountain ranges were envisioned as producing a “natural amphitheater” for the desert valley floor where Tucson sits.
Auctioneering Serves Two Purposes for Young Apache – Arizona Republic, December 31, 1962
The Auctioneer Song by Leroy Van Dyke has always been one of my favorite songs. Brazie Dan Goseyun, could have served as the role model for that song. He grew up on the San Carlos Apache Reservation and was a FFA member at Fort Thomas High School. His goal was to be a cowboy auctioneer. This article describes how he reached that goal and then gave back to the FFA. See Figure 6.
Figure 6. – Arizona Republic, December 31, 1962
Concluding Remarks
I always enjoyed listening to Paul Harvey and his “The Rest of the Story” radio broadcasts. They were on the air from 1976 to 2009. Paul would tell interesting stories of little-known or forgotten facts on a variety of subjects.
As I worked on this Friday Footnote, I sort of felt like Paul Harvey. I have discovered the challenge that Paul must have faced when deciding on what stories to tell. It would be easy to have several months of interesting stories just about agricultural education in Arizona. It was hard to just settle on five stories.
This is the third Footnote in the alphabetical series of Footnotes focused on states and I have already learned a lot. Agricultural education across America is diverse and dynamic. That is true of the past and today. However, there is a lot to be learned from the past. Some lessons from today’s Footnote are:
- In the early days of FFA and 4-H there was a sharp dividing line that one did not cross in keeping the activities of the two groups separate. Is this dividing line needed today?
- In Figure 2 the phrase “Most of the Future Farmer boys and girls are older than the usual average in 4-H Club work.” Was this just careless editing or were there girls in the FFA in Arizona in 1929?
- I wonder how many additional ways FFA members helped in winning World War II that have not been previously documented such as the Arizona “Ten Steer Club?”
- The FFA Program of Work was taken seriously in the past. Is it today?
- At one time there was a major emphasis in the FFA on Farm Safety and Community Development. We don’t hear much about that today. Perhaps we need to rediscover and reinvent the Farm Safety programs of the past and the Building our American Communities program.
- Do we welcome ALL students into the FFA with welcome arms and encourage them to reach their potential? The one sentence that stands out in the article about Brazie Dan Goseyun was the advice of Principal Eldon Randall of Fort Thomas High School to Brazie – “You can be anything you want to be if you want to be it badly enough.”