CA FFA Ag Issues Team Competes at National Convention

More than 60 thousand ag students are back at home following the National FFA Convention last week. I spoke with Gridley FFA student Becca Hamman, who traveled with her team from California to Indiana for the annual convention.

Hamman and her team competed in the Issues Forum, one of the newest speaking competitions to be added to the National FFA playing field, centered around current issues in the ag industry.

“Our issue was nucleoid coated seeds, which is a form of pesticide, but currently in California's regulation, it's not counted as a pesticide because it's applied to the seeds before the seeds enter the soil. So it's not considered a pesticide application. And our issue is that does it need to be regulated the same as a pesticide because it might have the same effect on our environment and human health? Or do we not regulated because it's the safest alternative that we have in the fact that it uses the least amount of pesticide? We just watched topics anywhere from the A.D.A. effect on agriculture to different ways to wrap your cotton and how that has impacted American agriculture. So it's really cool to see the diversity of different issues that agriculture goes under every single day.”