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Cultural and Global Competency: How FFA Connects Local Members to International Agriculture

What FFA Actually Teaches (Core Leadership Curriculum)

By FFApresident.com Editorial

Agriculture is among the most global industries there is, and FFA has been treating it that way for a long time. The organization’s international work does not require a passport for every member. It runs through officer exchanges, chapter projects, translated events and ordinary supply chains. This article collects documented examples and places them next to what employers say they want.

Advance CTE’s Career Ready Practices put it directly in the title of one practice: collaborate productively while using cultural and global competencies. The framework describes working effectively on diverse teams, respecting different perspectives, showing empathy and recognizing and mitigating bias.

The National Officers and Japan

FFA’s oldest international relationship is with Japan. According to a 2020 FFA article, former National FFA President George Lewis helped establish Future Farmers of Japan in 1950, and the national officers have visited Japan every year for more than four decades. The 2020 trip lasted 12 days and covered Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima and Kagoshima, mixing cultural sites with farms, from tea plantations to a daikon radish operation.

The officers reported two lessons that apply well beyond Japan. First, scale differs sharply: one officer said Japanese farms averaged about 4 acres compared with 443 in the U.S., so few farmers used large machines. Second, the challenges overlapped: both countries struggle to attract new farmers and manage succession. The officer team’s president said the biggest takeaway was that stepping outside your comfort zone improves understanding of agriculture, and that members from different cultures and languages share a common mission.

A Chapter Reaches Overseas

Global work also starts locally. A California chapter celebrating its first National FFA Week discovered that its Catholic school had a sister school in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where families depended on goats. As FFA reported in FFA Members in California Make a Global Impact, the chapter hosted a community event that drew about 120 people, raised $2,000 and used it to buy 50 goats for the sister school. The advisor, a National Teacher Ambassador for FFA, said the chapter planned to repeat a service project every year.

Seeing Another Country’s Agriculture Firsthand

Another FFA feature followed a Southeast Polk FFA chapter from Pleasant Hill, Iowa, on a 10-day trip to China as part of its International Learning Opportunity. The group visited a biotechnology innovation center, an agricultural science company and a John Deere plant in Tianjin, and met the U.S. ambassador and a USDA Foreign Agricultural Service briefing team. Students fundraised more than $23,000 over a year. According to the report, the chapter’s trip corrected assumptions: a student said China’s agriculture and technology were more advanced than she expected, and the advisor noted that 300-horsepower tractors were built in Tianjin even though most Chinese farms are smallholder operations.

Language Access: The Spanish Creed

Cultural competency also means opening the door to members whose first language is not English. FFA’s coverage of the first National Spanish FFA Creed Invitational, held at the 96th National FFA Convention & Expo in 2023, notes that Puerto Rico became a state FFA association in 1932 and that Hispanic/Latino members now number more than 100,000, roughly 15% of membership. Thirty-two members from 16 states competed in the invitational. The committee chair said the aim is to let students express and understand the Creed in the language they prefer.

Global Without Leaving Home

Even a jacket has an international story. A 2013 FFA New Horizons feature, The FFA Jacket: A Global Effort, explained that the fabric starts as U.S. cotton, is woven and dyed in China and is cut and sewn in Vietnam and Ohio, with personalization in Ohio. That was the process as of 2013 and may have changed, but the point stands: supply chains cross borders, and agricultural careers do too.

How to Build Competency on Purpose

  1. Ask about origins. For any product you handle, find out where each input comes from.
  2. Learn a few words. Basic phrases in a language common in your community go further than a speech.
  3. Interview someone from another farming system. Compare scale, labor, regulation and succession.
  4. Join, or start, a service project that connects your chapter to a community outside your own.

Honest Limits

Few members travel abroad, and a single trip does not make anyone culturally competent. The more reliable route is sustained contact: working on mixed teams, learning another language and treating colleagues with curiosity rather than assumption. These examples show that FFA creates openings for that. They do not show how many members use them.

Several past presidents on this site represent firsts and global links: Javier Moreno was the first Puerto Rican and first with a native language other than English; Corey Rosenbusch lived and worked in Indonesia early in his career; and Corey D. Flournoy was the first African American and first urban National FFA President.

Sources

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