It's a Small World after All... It is a small world after all.  As an officer team each visit we attend drives that point home even more.  After each visit when we debrief we find how close knit the agriculture industry truly is.  We began our day at Indiana Farm Bureau in Indianapolis, discussing the importance of advocacy and the implementation of policy to allow agriculture to keep moving forward and their part in that task.  During our discussion Bob Cherry offered a great piece of advice to all of us, “We should be trying to leave the organization better than when you entered it, your actions speak a lot.”  Later, Farm Bureau allowed us to tour their facilities and meet numerous staff members.  We were so grateful we had the opportunity to see Indiana Farm Bureau behind the scenes.   Farm Bureau your support is greatly appreciated! Following the visit at Indiana Farm Bureau we went down 7 floors to visit CountryMark.  We had the opportunity to enjoy a wonderful lunch with CountryMark and then continued to their conference room for a presentation where we were blown away by their marketing strategies and the complexity of their co-op. CountryMark focuses on five main areas in their co-op: Excellence, Improvement, Innovation, Integrity, and Reliability.  Not only do these five areas drive CountryMark to a prosperous future, but they are also incredibly proud to be Indiana’s only American-owned oil exploration, production, refining, and marketing company.   Thank You CountryMark for your generous support! To finish up our day we piled in the Traverse and began our trip to Lafayette to meet with Tom Bradford, Crop Production Services (CPS) national recruiting manager, in his gorgeous home.  He explained all of the great parts of CPS and their need for sales representatives, because hit the nail on the head when he said, “The career to be is in agriculture.”  Mr. Bradford’s biggest question was how to reach out to more students and interest them in CPS.  He’s searching for students who are hard workers and want to succeed.  We were happy to tell him that the FFA is organization to find those students.   Thank so much to Mr. Bradford and CPS for letting us visit and start building our relationship.   Farm Bureau and CountryMark are proud sponsors of Indiana FFA and we hope to build a strong relationship with Crop Production Services (CPS) so we can help provide them with opportunities to reach out to our members and inform them of all the opportunities available to them in FFA and agriculture.  We greatly appreciate what each of these businesses are doing and thank them for all of their hard work and dedication to the agriculture industry.      Advice of the Day: “When you have a job that you like then I don’t even consider it a job, it’s an opportunity.” –Bob Cherry, Indiana Farm Bureau   God Bless and Merry Christmas, Rebekah Frey Indiana FFA State Northern Region Vice President