Princeville High School junior Scott Donsbach described his drive to school Friday morning as “cold and slow.”
The about four-mile-long drive was especially challenging because the tractor he chose to navigate the chilly weather and icy roads for the annual Future Farmers of America Drive Your Tractor to School Day was a vintage AC WD-40 cabless tractor.
“I had planned to take a different tractor and (that tractor) started up fine this morning. But the tractor parked in front of that one wouldn’t start, and I couldn’t move that one to get the right tractor out to drive,” Donsbach explained, adding, “So, I had to take this one.”
Donsbach arrived at school a bit chilled, but still enthused, as he parked his little red tractor beside nearly a dozen mostly larger John Deere tractors lined up in the school’s back parking lot.
FFA students at Princeville have been driving their tractors to school the last day of national Future Farmers of America Week every year for more than three decades, said Joe House, who has been agriculture teacher and FFA adviser at the school for 33 years.
Many years there are more than the 12 tractors that participated this year, but the cold weather this week caused many of the students to leave their diesel tractors at home, House said.
“Diesel tractors don’t do so well in the cold. A lot of the kids are worried their diesels wouldn’t start to get home at the end of the day,” he said, adding that the school’s early release, at 11:20 a.m., made driving the tractors a bit more practical.
“If we’d have had a full day at school, with the tractors sitting in the cold that long, we’d have been in trouble.”
Driving to school Friday was “no big deal” for Dylan Endress, 17, a junior at Princeville High, who drives a tractor on a regular basis for his employer, Wes Sloan, a local farmer.
“The heater wasn’t working so well, and I was freezing to death, but it wasn’t too bad,” Endress said, after climbing out of his John Deere 4450 at the school’s parking lot.
Miles Smith, 15, a freshman at the school, said he had a lot of fun cruising through town in his family’s John Deere 8420.
“Driving to school was a lot of fun because I’m a farmer and I like to show off the tractor. It’s probably the biggest one here so far,” he said.
It took Jacob Ely, 16, about 20 minutes to drive his grandpa’s John Deere 4440 tractor from the family farm outside Brimfield to the school. The Ely family farms about 800 acres, and Jacob plans to run the farm someday, when his grandpa, Gene Ely, and Jacob’s dad, John Ely, choose to retire.
“Farming is what I really want to do. It’s in my family, it’s in my blood; there’s nothing I’d rather do,” he said.
In addition to driving tractors to school this week, Princeville High’s 75 FFA members took part in several FFA activities throughout the week. Participation in the various activities earned students points good toward participation in an annual canoeing trip along the Current River in Missouri with House at the end of the school year.
Although Kendra Knoblack, 16, a junior at Princeville High, didn’t ride a tractor to school Friday – it was much too cold for that, she said – she did earn points for wearing a tractor logo hat to school. However, it took a bit of creativity on her part, and on the part of her grandpa, Ed Ehnle, to earn those points, because Kendra didn’t own any shirts or hats with company imprinted logos.
Kendra’s hat was a green baseball cap, with a small toy John Deere tractor glued to the front.
“My grandpa glued it on for me,” she admitted sheepishly.
Kendra’s family owns about 20 acres of farmland, where the family raises Clydesdale horses. She said she loves farming and she enjoyed taking part in the week of FFA activities, just as she does in most of the class projects throughout the year in House’s classes.
“This is my funnest class,” she said. “You do work, but you get to have fun, too.”
Ruth Longoria Kingsland can be reached at 686-3196 or [email protected].
Read the original article from Journal Star.
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