Take your corn dogs and funnel cakes and have at it. If that’s what floats your boat about the annual California Mid-Winter Fair & Fiesta, more power to you. You’re not alone.
But there are several hundred dedicated youths, parents and volunteers at the fairgrounds for whom the fair is about animals and ag science. From grade school on up for 4-H and high school only for FFA, these 10 days now under way are the end results of hard work and long days that last almost all year long.
As one member of FFA put it, the anticipation around the fair is bigger than Christmas. Nicely put.
The leadership, life and agricultural science skills touched on in 4-H are often in preparation for the rigorous curriculum of FFA in which these areas of discipline and many more leave the realm of after-school activity and enter the airspace of higher-stakes classroom work, and ultimately college and professional prep work.
Students in FFA spend countless hours outside and inside the classroom, seeing their work continue on weekends, over summer break and during holidays. It’s an intensive regimen, for sure.
Yet it’s this sort of preparation that builds the hearts, minds and self-esteem of young men and women who learn invaluable skills that lead many of them on to greater arenas in their university and later professional lives. Check out the students you know who have spent more than a few casual years in 4-H than FFA; they have a certain maturity and discipline about them.
The fair is the hometown stage in which the out-of-town skills competitions, the classroom hours and the early mornings and late evenings tending to their animal projects are given room to shine for all the Valley to see.
This past weekend, the opening of the fair, was basically Christmas Eve for the FFA, 4-H and even independent youths and their projects. Many of them will not have moved past that point. For those who qualified to sell their animals at this coming weekend’s auction, well, that is Christmas morning, fresh off a visit from Santa himself.
Last year 577 animals were sold at the auction for a total of about $1.3 million. That is a nice sum and a welcome gift for all the effort that went into getting to that point. But like the toys on Christmas Day aren’t really the point, neither are the dollars at the auction. It’s the lessons, the opportunities, the future that lays ahead for many of those youths who have cut their teeth on what one can get from responsibility and the fruits of a 4-H and later FFA.
THE ISSUE:
Auction coming this weekend
WE SAY:
This is the culmination of lessons learned in 4-H and FFA.
WHAT DO YOU SAY?
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