A communications competition may be unexpected in the National FFA Organization, but Manhattan members brought home fourth place from the district agricultural communications competition on Oct. 3.

The ag comm contest consisted of many different and complicated parts of a publications operation.The team had three hours to create multiple social media posts, a newspaper layout, and relevant stories connecting back to the main topic, and of course, a coherent theme.

“They give us a subject, a problem that we can solve,” sophomore Annalise Orona said. “We had to create a way to advertise it and bring awareness to said problem.”

The lengthy process was only achievable with the help of the team, very knowledgeable in communications.

“Working on a team definitely lightened the load,” junior Landon Kerr said. “It is a bit harder to communicate ideas, but working on a team definitely helped make it so much easier.” 

With these constant challenges, the students managed to split up the work, each being assigned something they felt the most confident with; but most were most confident about the trust they had in their team.

“I felt the most confident with the team that I had,” Orona said. “I was in a more experienced team than I was last year. I went from the freshman team to the senior team.
 So that was a big leap.”

The big takeaway of this competition was learning how to connect these skills back to the career they want to pursue.

“Agricultral communications plays into every role of agriculture,” Kerr said. “In almost every agricultural space, you will have to communicate, you will have to share your information, you will have to talk, you will have to present stuff to other people.”