News

National officer joined FFA ‘chasing a girl’

A young man who is now a National FFA officer began his FFA career in search of romance. Shea Booster has reached the top of the FFA leadership ladder, selected to be the organization’s Western Region Vice President. That might have never happened had it not been for him being smitten.

“I joined FFA actually chasing a girl,” said Booster, who’s from Bend, Oregon.

The relationship fizzled, but Booster, with no agriculture background, found his passion with the help of what he calls an amazing agriculture educator.

“Pretty soon after joining the FFA I was castrating hogs in one of our classes, I was administering vaccines to cattle, I was docking tails on sheep, I learned how to drive a tractor,” he told Brownfield Ag News.

Booster hopes for a career motivating others, but he tells Brownfield if he could change one thing, it would be to have grown up on a farm.

“I think that that is something that’s lost on our generation, my generation specifically, with less than two percent of the American population being involved in production agriculture,” he said. “I wish that I was able to share that honor and say that I was one of those two percent.”

Booster spoke Thursday at the Missouri FFA Convention in Columbia.