FFA 

My dad was born in 1941. The Great Depression was slow to end in rural southeast Oklahoma, causing my dad to grow up in poverty. His dad used a team of mules to grade the highway, and his mother cooked at the small, one room school about a mile south of where they lived on Cedar creek.

They had a large garden, a milk cow and hogs to butcher. My dad grew up having to work hard or starve, to him farming equated to poverty. Owning a cow meant having to get up before daylight to milk it. A garden meant long hot days spent hoeing and plowing the ground with a team of mules. Likewise hogs meant feeding and then butchering them.

My dad was drafted into the Vietnam war. After he did his tour in the army he married my mom and worked for the Kansas City Southern Railroad for almost forty years. He built a brick house on seven acres. He never wanted to own cattle, hogs or even a chicken because of the farm and the poverty he experienced growing up.

When I was a freshman in high school I took my first agriculture class. The teacher required us to pay dues to join Future Farmers of America or FFA. My dad was adamantly against me joining. The first semester I made a grade of C because I didn’t pay the dues. I can remember my dad telling Mr Gibson, the ag teacher he grew up on a farm and agriculture class / FFA was for dummies. Dad told him he milked cows and plowed a field with mules and he didn’t like it one bit and he sure as heck didn’t want his kids living like that.

I was finally able to pay my FFA dues when school started in January my freshman year. I learned to weld in ag class, I learned how to grade stands of timber and calculate the value of a stand. I also learned about figuring weight gain on calves and the cost of feed to put a pound of gain on a calf. My SAE taught me to figure expenses and in kind labor.

It’s funny now, looking back on how my career in agriculture got started. I roped calves and ended up going to college on rodeo scholarships. I majored in education, but i minored in animal science. I took every elective class I could over in ag hall or the animal science building.

Since graduating from college I’ve bought and sold stands of timber, fed calves out, and owned a cow calf operation for about twenty years now. Most everything I have has came from agriculture in some way or another.

When dad retired from the railroad he bought a few cows to have something to do. He’s helped me bale hay and keep it all afloat through drought and disease these past couple of decades.

One time a lady asked me if I owned a business. I told her no, I just have a small farm. She smiled and said, that’s a hard business to make it in. I told her I never thought of it as a business, it’s just what I do and who I am. Shoot, pretty much everything I have came from what I learned in FFA. I think dad even changed his mind a little as the years went by. There’s nothing like the smell of fresh cut hay or watching a baby calf stand up for the first time.

James Lockhart lives near the Kiamichi mountains in southeast Oklahoma. He writes cowboy stories and fools with cows and horses.