Sheldon, Iowa — Last week was National FFA Week. But at Sheldon High School, they have extended the focus on FFA for another week.
Sheldon FFA Advisor Jacob Fox says the pandemic made an annual event that they host for elementary kids a little challenging this year.
(as said) “One of the things that the kids decided to do since we couldn’t do it, you know earlier this year with the quarantine and COVID and everything is they’re still going to do their Farm Safety Day with the second graders. In the past, we’ve done a day camp where the second graders have come over. We’ve put them through a bunch of different activities and stations.”
Fox says they still won’t be doing it the way they had done it in the past, but there will be a way that the FFA students can teach the elementary students about farm safety.
(as said) “With that not being an option this year, we kind of rack our brains first quarter to what we could do. And so the kids actually are creating a virtual Farm Safety Week. They recorded five-minute videos of the different stations, you know, doing demonstrations things like that and there’s sending that and activities over to the elementary school to kind of try to cover our form safety day that we missed… trying to come up with some creative ways to still get that information out to those kids.”
The National FFA Organization says the top three causes of injuries among children on farms are falls, animals and machinery/vehicles. They tell us statistics show that every day, 33 children are injured in an agriculture-related incident, and that the number of ag-related youth worker fatalities is higher than all other industries combined.
