The Kansas 2028 Project, Something to Emulate (4/26/2024)

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Three weeks ago the nation was abuzz with the solar eclipse. One of my former students, who lives in North Carolina, wrote to tell me that he and his family drove to Texas and passed through my home town of Lampasas to see the eclipse. People across the nation and internationally traveled thousands of miles to witness this phenomenon. It will be 20 years before America experiences another total solar eclipse.

While not exactly a solar eclipse, the year 2028 is an important date for some people, especially those associated with agricultural education and the Future Farmers of America (FFA). This will be the 100th anniversary of the founding of the FFA.

While agricultural educators are typically very pragmatic and don’t always place much attention on the past, the year 2028 might be an exception. However, one cannot wait until 2028 to start planning for that historic event. Now is the time to get started. That is what they are doing in Kansas.

Project 2028 – A Celebration of Kansas FFA History

The Kansas FFA website says this about Project 2028:

Kansas FFA has a rich and deep history, which we are seeking to celebrate as we quickly approach the 100th Anniversary milestone of this agricultural leadership youth organization. The preservation of this organization’s legacy and stories is the critical mission of Project 2028. It is through our shared history that we will uncover the path to a greater future.

Project 2028 has four main objectives. They are:

  1. Create a searchable online research database with all available archives for Kansas FFA history research of individuals, events, and chapters.
  2. Identify critical characters in the narrative of Kansas FFA and record their voice and stories for future Kansas FFA members and persons interested. Have interviews available through a searchable online database and a record available in the permanent archives.
  3. Identify and procure essential artifacts that are needed for the Kansas FFA archives to provide a complete picture of Kansas FFA history.
  4. Prepare a book celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Kansas FFA Association.

Kansas will not be starting from scratch on this endeavor. Someone has already done considerable work in documenting the past of the FFA in Kansas. There are currently web pages or files of:

Does your state have something like this? If not, now is the time to start. The following graphic from the Kansas FFA website sums up what needs to be done.

While state FFA histories are important, so are chapter FFA histories. How many local FFA chapters know when they were started, have a list of chapter officers, know who were state or national award winners or officers from the chapter, and the list goes on. If your FFA chapter has a historian or students who are doing independent studies, perhaps they could get the ball rolling.

Resources for Documenting State and Local FFA Histories

Where does one start in constructing state or local FFA Histories? During the process of writing the Friday Footnotes, I use a variety of resources. Following is one resource that I have found to be very useful. In the next Friday Footnote we will explore other resources.

HathiTrust Digital Library (https://www.hathitrust.org/) – HathiTrust was founded in 2008 as a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries now preserving 18+ million digitized items in the HathiTrust Digital Library. The mission of HathiTrust is to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge. And it is free to use.

There are numerous online agricultural education/FFA/NFA documents including the Federal Board for Vocational Education documents from the early days of agricultural education. There are also a variety of state education reports. There are standard and advanced search options. A standard search earlier this week for “Future Farmers of America” resulted in 21,848 hits. There were 1,243 hits for “New Farmers of America”

Some of the FFA/NFA related books or bulletins in Hathi include:

This list is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many, many documents about vocational agriculture and the FFA or NFA in the HathiTrust Digital Library.

One of the go-to documents I use often in the HathiTrust library is the History of Agricultural Education of Less Than College Grade in the United State. This is the 1942 book compiled by Rufus Stimson and Frank Lathrop. It has chapters on each state plus chapters on teacher education, home projects, professional organizations, student organizations and more. I have several paper copies of this book but the great thing about the digital version is it can be searched. For example the word “Kansas” appears 49 times in this book.

If you want to really go back in time Alfred True’s A History of Agricultural Education in the United States 1785-1925 can be consulted or searched. Kansas appears 42 times in this document.

To Be Continued

Typically the last section of a Friday Footnote is titled “Concluding Remarks.” However, the list of resources I use in preparing the Friday Footnote is far greater than just the HathiTrust Library. So we haven’t concluded what this Footnote has started.

Next week we will continue to describe the FFA/NFA/Agricultural Education historical resources and explore additional resources such as the Internet Archive, Newspapers.com, Chapter Chats, Classmates.com, National FFA Archives, Library of Congress, Goggle Books, and more. Stay tuned.