By NANCY VORIS
Indiana Correspondent

TRAFALGAR, Ind. — Emilie Kuhn witnessed a transformation since joining FFA five years ago in the Rushville Consolidated School District. As a freshman, she said the organization was heavy with production agriculture students and she wondered if FFA received the respect it deserved from classmates and society in general.
“We were considered ‘cows, sows and plows,’” Kuhn said. “The misconception was that those ‘blue jackets’ farm the land, but they’re not very smart.”

Over the past decade FFA has shifted the scales of its mission, moving off-center from its focus on production agriculture toward building leadership skills.

The result, Kuhn said, is that employers now view the blue jackets as a symbol of leadership and community service.

“They’re the kids you want working for you,” she said.

Now Kuhn resides at the Indiana FFA Leadership Center as the FFA state secretary, serving as an ambassador for the organization. She gets excited about the people she has met around the state and how they work separately and together to advance agriculture in Indiana.

“When you’re in leadership, the networking is amazing. Words can’t describe it,” Kuhn said.

But she admits it wasn’t always easy speaking to strangers. Kuhn grew up on a dairy farm that was in her family for more than 100 years. Her father and uncle went into hog production, then corn and soybeans. In 4-H she showed a hog and a market lamb, and decided she “hated” the hogs and stuck with lambs. Now the Kuhn family raises Southdown lambs, mostly for show animals.

She joined FFA in high school because of her love of farming, but admits she was shy and had trouble with the organization’s leadership training. “But my advisor hit me hard, and said ‘You’re an FFA member.’”

The more she joined in activities like livestock judging, public speaking, career development events and FFA week, the more her confidence grew. Kuhn said during her years in high school she saw the membership evolve from farm kids and production agriculture to urban kids interested in landscaping, flower shops and horticulture. She said everyone learned to get over stereotyping each other, even when a cheerleader joined the group.

“We each did our own thing, but we were able to respect and learn from each other.”

When she graduated last year, the FFA membership was 119, with the majority being students with a non-farming background. Since broadening the scope of FFA training, the National FFA Organization membership reached a 31-year high in 2008, topping out at 507,763 members in 7,439 FFA chapters across the United States, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

“This is an exciting time for FFA, as we are nearing the all-time-high membership total we originally reached in the 1970s,” said Dr. Larry Case, chief executive officer and national advisor for the National FFA Organization.

Membership highs in 1976-77 were 509,000. Since that time, the percentage of members living on farms has decreased. Today, 27 percent of FFA members live in rural farm areas, while 40 percent live in rural nonfarm areas and the remaining 33 percent live in urban and suburban areas.

Although it is constantly evolving, agriculture remains the nation’s largest economic sector and accounts for 17 percent of the American workforce. To meet that need, the National FFA Organization is supporting a strategic long-range goal to have 10,000 quality agricultural education programs with FFA chapters nationwide by the year 2015. Kuhn said that Indiana membership is nearing 9,500 in 187 FFA chapters. During FFA Week, she and other state officers will be traveling around the state to recruit at middle schools while school districts are planning schedules for the 2009-2010 school year.

The agriculture community needs to work together to promote agriculture to the public sector, she said.