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Marietta FFA members stay busy with projects

Marietta FFA members often balance family, school, sports, and work activities with a busy FFA schedule.

Each Marietta FFA member is required to have a Supervised Agricultural Experience Project (SAE). This is a project that the student does outside of school. Most of the Marietta FFA members have entrepreneurial SAE projects such as businesses raising livestock or mowing yards.

However, some students have job placement projects where they work for area agricultural businesses. A great example of this is Junior Brett Baurbach. Brett works at Rech's Angus Farm for his placement SAE and Market Chickens as an entrepreneurship SAE. He manages this while attending MHS, taking college classes, and playing soccer, all while being an active FFA member. His FFA activities include participating in Urban Soils, Ag Power Diagnostics, Ag Skills, and Outdoor Power. Brett manages his time to make sure he shows up to every practice, every competition and every event.

The Marietta FFA has many other great students who help organize and participate in field trips and events. Many of the events the Marietta FFA participates in are called Career Development Events (CDE's). The CDEs are designed to be competitions that replicated real life agricultural careers and demonstrate an FFA member's mastered skill sets for that career.

The Marietta FFA participates in a variety of CDE's centered around agricultural mechanics, livestock, and soils. We are very thankful for our Alumni that donate countless hours of their time to assist in teaching their specialty skills to our members. Dave Bauerbach coaches the Marietta FFA Urban and Rural Soil Judging teams. Dave meets with students in the spring to discuss the basics of soils and encourage members to get involved with the team. He holds a few practices in the spring to introduce new members to the competition and makes plans for summer and fall practices. Marietta FFA has been participating in Ag mechanic based CDE's for 46 years. It was originally started by Alan Moore and is now being run by his son Scott Moore and a team of our great coaches that are mostly alumni of past CDE teams. Thank you Scott Moore, Brian Barth, Dave Bauerbach, Sam Lisk, Ryan Moore, Wesley Satterfeild, Todd Stacy, Tyler Stacy, and Eric Zimmer. We would also like to thank the following businesses that support our program by hosting practices at their facilities and allowing us to train on their equipment. Thank you Bridgeport Equipment, Brian Barth Excavating, Fischer Process Industries, Stacy Family Farm, and Zimmer View Farms. Due to the continuous effort of our coaches our team continues to place well, last year our team won the District 10 competition and went to the state level competition. This year our team placed second in District 10 and now we wait on our results to see if our team made it to state competition.

In addition to SAE projects and CDE competitions our students are engaged in a variety of FFA related activities.

The events that Marietta FFA Members participate in include our Marietta Alumni Orientation Cookout, local fairs, the Farm Science Review, Barnyard Olympics, Ohio and National FFA Conventions, fundraising events, harvesting sap and making maple syrup at the Washington County Home, the Ohio State 4-H and FFA Hockey Day, Leadership Nights, learning how to birth calves at the Eastern Agricultural Research Station, and FFA Week Activities. The events for this year's FFA Week at Marietta High School include an in school assembly, trip to Bob Evans for breakfast, Greenhand Initiation, 2024-2025 Officer Elections, "Drive Anything But a Car to School Day", and the annual FFA Week Cookout. The culmination of these activities will be the Marietta FFA Banquet on March 21, 2024 at Marietta High School.