OFI 1973: Adding Enterprises For Diversification | FFA SAE Edition | Mercedes Jones | Wessington Springs High School FFA

Mercedes Jones is her chapter’s historian and her district’s sentinel, and she is only in her sophomore year of high school! She is also the recipient of a $1,000 SAE grant for a flower business that she has been launch with her family on their farm in South Dakota.

Mercedes is in a unique position with both of her parents being full-time farmers. This is the life that she has known since she was four years old and her family moved to the multi-generational farm and both of her parents left their city jobs to devote all of their time here. Mercedes is learning that maintaining this lifestyle with revenue that is produced exclusively from the farm is a challenge, and it takes innovation and hard work to meet that challenge. As a result, she and her family are in the development process of adding flowers as a crop on their farm, and developing their “direct to consumer” business model. She has already become an expert in varieties of flowers as well as planting and preservation methods, and there is no doubt why she was awarded the grant.

SUPERVISED AGRICULTURAL EXPERIENCE: Flower Production

HIGH SCHOOL: Wessington Springs High School; Wessington Springs, South Dakota

MASCOT: Spartans

FFA ADVISOR: Brady Duxbury

CONTACT INFORMATION FOR MERCEDES JONES:

Click on the picture below to be taken to the Wessington Springs High School Ag. Department’s website:

Mercedes’s FFA Advisor’s Email Address: Brady.Duxbury@k12.sd.us

Wessington Springs High School’s Telephone Number: (605) 539-9391

FFA LINKS:

National FFA Organization

Supervised Agricultural Experiences (SAE’s)

Support FFA

Donate to FFA – One way that FFA students are able to start small businesses is through an FFA grant of $1,000. In 2014, 141 FFA students received these grants. With your donations, more students can get this head start – pay it forward.

REASONS TO DONATE TO FFA:

Only 2% of Americans grow and raise most of the food and livestock consumed by the other 98% as well as the rest of the world. FFA is providing the needed education, training and resources to Americans that will carry that torch forward and insure that America continues to have inexpensive, quality food.
Rural Communities will rely on entrepreneurship in the future for population growth and job creation. The FFA is a major catalyst to that entrepreneurial growth.
Farmers, ranchers and those working in agriculture give the rest of America incredible amounts of freedom because the search for food is as simple as going to the grocery store:

“Because American farmers are able to provide for so many of us, they give more and more of us the freedom to pursue goals and livelihoods beyond growing the food we need to survive.”

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack