Year three was busy for the Mt. Pleasant FFA chapter

The Mt. Pleasant FFA chapter has continued to stay active and engaged over the last year.

One of the biggest projects of the last year has been the planning and construction of the William M. and Donna J. Hoaglin Garden behind the high school. This garden serves as a hands-on learning experience for the students to utilize all the content they learn in classes in a real-world setting.

The garden includes four raised beds, two in-ground plots, automatic waters, an 8-foot deer fence, and a 14-foot-by-32-foot storage shed.

Special thanks to this project to Mary Elgar for her grant writing assistance, the William M. and Donna J. Hoaglin Foundation board for the allocation of grant funds, and Chuck Albright for coming out every week to help us with all planning and preparation to have a garden. The garden has already served as a challenging and rewarding learning experience and will for countless years to come.

Another cool experience for the chapter this year has been working at Old Threshers.

This year, our group worked with the Pork Producers at The Pork Shoppe, in addition to helping at the Drive-a-Tractor station.

With the Pork Producers, students assisted in the cooking and distributing of meals to customers. With the Drive-a-Tractor group, students were involved for multiple days of teaching participants to drive tractors. They then actually rode with the participants as they maneuvered the tractor through the obstacle course. This served as an awesome experience for all involved!

We plan to continue this partnership for years to come! Huge special thanks to Joel Proenneke for all the hard work he puts in year-round to put together an amazing experience for participants.

A couple other activities we have done this year include out annual clothing drive and feed the farmer events. We are working to continue planning activities to fill needs in our community.

Within the classroom, we have continued working with the hydroponic systems and experimented with a variety of different things such as alternative growing media, seed germination techniques, and reusing growing media such as Rockwool to reduce waste.

We want to give a huge thank you to everyone in the community for their continued support over the years. We cannot thank you enough.

It is due to your support that we continue to have amazing new experiences to prepare us for the future. We are continuing to gain more experiences as this year we had our first Iowa degree recipient and first district officer candidate.

We are loving year three of the program and cannot wait to see all the new activities to come!

Follow out Facebook page at “Mt. Pleasant AG ED & FFA” for additional updates and new announcements coming soon!