Sierra Hemond was in seventh grade when videos from a national agricultural convention started showing up on her phone. “Every video showed members building lifelong friendships, competing in career development events and developing leadership skills while proudly wearing the iconic blue corduroy jacket,” she recalled. Her school in Poland, Maine, had no chapter of its own, so she researched what it would take to start one, developed a plan, and worked with others who shared her passion. Shortly thereafter, Poland FFA became an official chapter.
Hemond is a fifth-generation agriculturist whose family had never joined the FFA. Since founding the chapter, she has taken first place in Maine’s dairy evaluation event and qualified for the national competition. Her chapter now appears in a program that pairs chapters across state lines, matched with Whitehall FFA in Michigan.
What Hemond built her way into is the largest youth organization in American agriculture. The National FFA Organization counts 1,053,847 student members in 9,591 chapters across all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, a record the group announced in August and a 1.1% increase over the previous year.
Photo Courtesy FFA
The organization was established in Kansas City in 1928 as the Future Farmers of America, 11 years after the Smith-Hughes National Vocational Education Act created vocational agriculture courses in American high schools. Thirty-three delegates from 18 states attended the first convention, where national dues were set at 10 cents. Congress granted a federal charter in 1950, and President Harry S. Truman signed it into law. New Farmers of America, which had served Black agriculture students since 1935, merged with FFA in 1965 following the Civil Rights Act, and membership was opened to girls in 1969. Delegates changed the name to the National FFA Organization in 1988 to “reflect the growing diversity in agriculture,” but they kept the letters, which the organization calls “a part of our history and our heritage that will never change.”
The FFA’s agricultural education runs on a three-component model of classroom and laboratory instruction, work-based learning, and student leadership organizations, of which FFA is one. The work-based piece is the Supervised Agricultural Experience, or SAE, which can mean running a business, holding a job, conducting original research, or building a service project. SAE for All, an initiative of the National Council for Agricultural Education funded by the National FFA Foundation, sorts these into two different types of experiences. Foundational experiences cover career planning, personal finance, workplace safety, employability skills, and agricultural literacy and exploration. Immersion experiences build on those skills through internships, entrepreneurship, research, school-based enterprise, and service learning.
Members can pursue 47 national proficiency areas and compete in 24 national career development events, preparing for more than 300 possible careers. AgExplorer, its career site, groups them into twelve focus areas, including agribusiness, biotechnology, skilled trades, and sustainability. A separate literacy platform hosts the #SpeakAg Dialogues discussion series, which the organization designed to “transcend the polarized opinions of today’s society, and to instead expose student members to multiple sides of hot-button agricultural issues.”
This hands-on preparation yields massive financial returns for students. FFA members collectively earn more than $4 billion a year through hands-on work experiences, and the organization says a single scholarship application opens opportunities totaling nearly $2.5 million.
Photo Courtesy National FFA Organization
Employer demand for those graduates outruns the supply. A report from Purdue University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), released last fall, projects about 104,766 annual job openings through 2030 across business and management; science and engineering; food and biomaterials production; and education, communication and governmental services. Graduates holding degrees in those fields will account for only 48% of the annual supply, NIFA reported, with allied disciplines contributing a quarter and the rest drawn from unrelated fields, including roughly 10% of positions filled by candidates without a degree.
The bottleneck is not student interest. FFA names the shortage of qualified agriculture teachers as the greatest challenge facing the organization and agricultural education. Travis Park, the national FFA advisor and chairman of the board of directors, told Ag Daily that roughly 150 new chapters are chartered every year, and as membership and programs have grown, “we really feel the pinch for ag teachers.” Barry Croom, an agricultural education professor at the University of Georgia, framed the stakes in state terms, noting that agriculture accounts for roughly $100 billion of Georgia’s economy and about one in seven jobs there, and that a thin teacher pipeline sets the entire industry back.
The case for the work is most concrete in Alaska, which this year marks 50 years since it became the last of the 50 states to receive an FFA charter. Liam Wade, the state’s 2026-27 president, was a sixth grader in North Pole when pandemic shipping delays left his city without a single food delivery for about two weeks. He started with a desktop hydroponic system and expanded it into a district program of eight systems across several schools, producing roughly 100 pounds of greens and herbs every three weeks, at least 30% of which he donates to community members.
The Alaska FFA Association itself nearly disappeared. The pandemic left the state with just six chapters and 100 members as teachers retired and schools closed, but federal education relief funding helped rebuild it to roughly 20 chapters and about 500 members. Alaska now has the highest rate of new and beginning farmers in the country and recorded an 18% increase in small farms between 2017 and 2022, FFA reported.
Wade, who is headed to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, rejects the idea that any of this is a regional curiosity. “Alaskan agriculture is not far north agriculture; it’s not Arctic agriculture; it’s American agriculture,” he said.
Photo Courtesy FFA
The same institution looks different in every state. Iowa’s association reports it has grown to more than 20,800 student members in 273 chapters, up from 576 members and 23 chapters in 1929, and executive director Scott Johnson told Brownfield Ag News, “We are plus-40% on membership in the last 10 years and plus-25% in the last five.”
Raine Wheeler, a Vinton-Shellsburg chapter member with no farm background, runs her own agricultural advocacy page and hosts a podcast featuring her chapter’s members. In Utah, Morgan Wilde served as chapter reporter, then chapter president, then a state officer who helped rebuild the state’s area facilitator program. She now studies animal science at Utah State University and works at an equine clinic. “I’ve always been a goal setter and a dreamer,” she told the organization. “I want to inspire others to see that their dreams can turn into reality if they work for it.” Maine, where Hemond started, remains among the smallest programs in the country, with 417 members statewide. However, the organization reported in August that it is one of the three fastest-growing by percentage.
Recently, Scott Stump, CEO of the National FFA Organization, and Chloe Zittergruen, the 2025–2026 Iowa FFA State President, attended Farmfluencers at the Iowa State Fair. Additionally, FFA members will gather in Indianapolis from Oct. 21 to 24 for the 99th national convention, an event that FFA says drew 73,379 attendees last year. It also begins the countdown to a centennial celebration the organization has scheduled to run from October 2027 through October 2028. Senators introduced a resolution this year designating Feb. 21 through 28 as National FFA Week, with cosponsors drawn from across the political spectrum. Hemond plans to spend the centennial in a classroom of her own, teaching agriculture. She wrote that she wants students to understand that the industry offers opportunities “far beyond the farm.”
