FFA officers ‘Sparking Interest’ across Illinois

From chapter visits to leadership training schools, the Illinois FFA major state officers have been “Sparking Interest” in FFA and the agriculture industry as a whole. The majors are down to only one week left of our five total weeks of chapter visits.

This year is definitely a little bit of change having six major state officers during chapter visits. This means that we only have five total weeks of chapter visits.

Our chapter visits this year are labeled as “Sparking Interest,” whether that be in FFA or the overall agriculture industry. The majors’ goal is to tie together almost every aspect of agriculture.

Our workshop this year not only highlights the 100th anniversary of the historic Route 66, but also relates the over 34,500 miles of Illinois state highways back to production agriculture.

The chapter visit workshop also directly highlights how all of our opportunities in FFA are directly tied to the agricultural industry.

The objective is for students to learn more about agriculture, as well as how every person has their own perspectives, strengths and ideas.

The major state officers have now officially covered 20 of the 25 sections across the state.

From Section 1 in the northwest corner to Section 25 in the southeast corner, our state may have some very large variation in landscape, but one thing remains the same — and that is the passion we all have for agriculture.

While in each section for one week, one or two major state officers, the section president and the section officers visit almost every single school in each section.

After the fifth week, the majors hope to have visited over 390 FFA chapters across the entire state, impacting over 43,000 FFA students.

While our chapter visits are just about done, our last week of visits will be put on hold with the 98th National FFA Convention & Expo coming up.

We will be watching our very own past state president, Thaddeus Bergschneider, take the stage in Indianapolis as the 2024-2025 National FFA president.

Outside of going to the sessions, though, our state officer team will be at convention to handle some official business as delegates at the National FFA Convention. This year we will have 15 delegates from Illinois serving on six different committees.

Our committee work as delegates helps create ideas from the students on things that we think need changed or revised as an organization.

We then have business sessions where we will try and pass these new ideas as recommendations to the National FFA Organization.

As we are an organization heavily involved in service, we along with other state FFA organizations have a National Day of Service while at the National FFA Convention, where we will go out and do community service somewhere around Indianapolis.

Whether that be at a cemetery or forest or anything in between, this allows us to give back to the communities.

Outside of all of our activities, we look forward to honoring each and every one of our American FFA Degree recipients from Illinois as they walk across the stage, as well as our national winners and finalists, National Chapter Award winners and all of our amazing leaders in Illinois FFA.

Needless to say, the majors may be getting close to completing chapter visits, but things definitely are not going to be slowing down anytime soon.

The majors are looking forward to “sparking connections” across the country at the National FFA Convention.

Ethan Bremmer from the Pearl City FFA Chapter is the 2025-2026 Illinois Association FFA state reporter.