As Holy Grails go at the county Farm Bureau level, the secret to ensuring strength and smooth continuity among local leadership ranks pretty high. Whether that priority’s on your front burner or smoldering somewhere unseen, you’re in luck.
Just so happens there’s a quiet masterclass in session down in Barry County, so grab a straw bale while cattleman and tenured professor Boyd Endsley collects his notes. His current term as county president (third or fourth; he can’t recall) was informed by three decades of prior board service, and in that time he’s seen some things — and helped navigate through them.
Let’s start at the beginning:
“When I first got on the board 30-some years ago, I said to those guys then, ‘We got a problem: There’s too many of you old guys, not enough new guys.’
“And they were all like, ‘Yeah it’s been like that for 20 years.’”
It’s a familiar tune, and — full transparency — Barry’s solution was as much about luck and fortunate timing as any one person’s skill set, but how it came together is still worth sharing.
“When my kids were in high school, I got to coach parliamentary procedure for the FFA kids,” Endsley recalls. “It just happened to be at the right time that there was a group of kids with farm backgrounds we could pull from.
“You’ve got to have a topic when you’re practicing parli-pro, so I made up topics about working with Farm Bureau to do activities.
“I taught them early on that there was value to Farm Bureau,” he said. “That’s where I got them: Three of our young board members came through that program.”
Pitching the sometimes intangible value of Farm Bureau membership can test anyone’s persuasion. Endsley’s approach with young people is to keep it simple:
“You have to get them in high school and teach them the value — the leadership program, the community network — teach them the value of what Farm Bureau is doing at the next level, and hang on to them.
“That’s the easiest way to get the people that truly are gonna be there for the next generation — get them young: Not only recruit them, but teach them leadership skills while they’re young.
“They need to be able to lead in the future.”
Acknowledging that Lady Luck had her finger on the scale, Endsley backs up a few steps to shine a light on the bigger context:
“We’ve gotta start sourcing new ag teachers,” he said, noting the inconvenient truth that unhealthy or non-existent FFA programs are barren fields yielding little talent worth harvesting.
Mending that greater deficiency is another chore for another day (and another article). For now, Endsley’s enjoying the fruit he started tending more years ago than he’d rather calculate.
“It’s going well. I’ve got more young members on the board than we’ve had since I first joined it,” he said, echoing some parting comments from his predecessor, Mick Kokx.
“Mick said it when he stepped down as county president: ‘I feel better than ever about this board — since I’ve been on it — because we have such a good group of young people.”
There’s more to Boyd. Check it out.
