Marathon FFA was busy within past year
By Loralie Peters Marathon FFA Vice President
This 2019-2020 FFA year has been quite a successful one. We not only have been active in the school, but also in our community through volunteer work by our FFA Chapter members.
We kicked off the fall with our annual Highway Cleanup. We separated into four teams and worked together to clean CTH NN. We ended our mile long journey with at least 10 bags full of highway litter. Afterward, our participating members were awarded with pizza and soda.
Later in October, our FFA chapter hosted our annual Food for America event at the Kreager Farm. For this event, we invited the MAES and St. Mary’s fourth grade classes to visit the local dairy farm and learn the milking process, farm equipment safety and calf care.
Not only has our FFA reached out to the community through cleaning its highways and educating the youth about agriculture, but we also have continued hosting several blood drives in our school.
In January, we worked with Versiti in order to bring a life saving donation opportunity for the students and teachers of Marathon High School. For this event, we had a total of 14 blood donations. Not only does our FFA chapter host life saving donation events, but we also have outreach to the older community through our Toy Tractor sales in December.
In order to host community outreach events, award scholarships and award our volunteers with the rodeo trip, our FFA holds an annual fruit sale in November. Our members reach out to the community and work very hard to gain sales. We not only sell fruit and plants, but our FFA chapter works with Custom Meats to sell beef sticks and summer sausages. We thank all those who purchase and support our chapter.
With all the hard work our members put in through volunteering at our events, as a chapter we do provide an award trip in January. On Jan. 25, our FFA chapter along with the FFA chapter from Abbotsford took a trip to Minneapolis where members were allowed to shop at Mall of America for five hours. Afterwards, members were provided dinner at the Country Buffet.
Our trip to Minneapolis ended with participating at the Cinch World’s Toughest Rodeo. This event awarded our members with a time to relax and enjoy what they have earned.
As a chapter, we look forward to our upcoming events including National FFA Week, FFA banquet, river clean up, spring blood drive and the state convention.
