Inside the bustling hallways of Hamilton Southeastern High School, the future of American agriculture is spending the week debating multi-million-dollar industry challenges. The 97th Indiana FFA State Convention kicked off Monday with its Leadership Development Events (LDEs), a series of rigorous competitions tasking students with everything from agricultural communications and sales presentations to extemporaneous public speaking.
For the members of the Lebanon FFA chapter, the convention represents the culmination of months of intense investigative research into deeply nuanced structural and biological topics.
Lyla Susong, a sophomore at Lebanon High School, is anchoring her chapter’s entry in the “senior” Agricultural Issues LDE. Her team spent the last half-year investigating the multi-faceted national and localized impacts of equine herpesvirus—a highly contagious pathogen capable of causing severe respiratory and neurological damage in horses.
“I learned that equine herpesvirus is very, very detrimental to horses, and once you get it, once they get it, it’s very hard to cure it,” Susong said. “So, it is a very dangerous disease for horses.”
The Ag Issues competition requires students to analyze the biological, financial, and societal ripples of contemporary agricultural dilemmas. To build their case, Susong’s team cross-examined medical experts spanning from local agricultural infrastructure to national prominent institutions.
“We started six months ago starting our research, and we have met with a few different vets,” Susong explained. “So we met with people from the World Equestrian Center in Florida, and then her name is Katie Flynn, and then we met with Dr. McDavid, who’s a local veterinarian to Lebanon, and we’ve met with a few other people as well.”
The complexity of the virus, Susong noted, lies in how it structurally alters the livestock. “There’s two different strains, there’s a neurological strain and then there’s another strain,” she said. “And the neurological strain just messes with their head and they don’t know how to control themselves. So, it is just very, very dangerous to them.”
Novice Division Tackles Data Center Boom
While high school students debated livestock pathology, middle schoolers and incoming freshmen competed in the “novice” division of the LDE circuit. Jada Sweatt, a Lebanon High School freshman, is leading a six-person novice team focused on a highly controversial land-use topic directly affecting regional economies: the rapid proliferation of metadata centers.
The construction of massive corporate data infrastructure on rural acreage has sparked fierce debates over historical farmland preservation versus municipal modernization.
“The information for metadata centers just changes constantly,” Sweatt said. “So there’s no way to get definite information because, you know, like it’s very secretive, it changes, everything happens.”
Sweatt’s presentation details the conflicting interests of local agricultural stakeholders and economic development corporations.
“There’s many different effects. They can be good, they can be bad,” Sweatt noted. “A lot of farm owners and just land owners, they’re against it because farmland, and that’s such a big part of the Boon County—just Boon County in general, and everything like that. But there’s also benefits like bringing in more people, development, helping us with finding new jobs.”
A Platform for Empathy and Leadership
For participants, the blue corduroy jacket of the FFA serves as more than just a uniform for public speaking; it functions as an exercise in community perspective.
“It gives me a chance to connect with my community and just figuring out new things that I never knew,” Sweatt said. “It puts me in other people’s shoes and it really teaches me empathy on what’s going on with them as well.”
The competitive field will narrow down before the final state-wide accolades are handed out. Teams tracking their standings will find out if they achieved a top-four placement ahead of the formal stage presentations.
The official winners across all senior and novice LDE categories will be announced Thursday, June 18, when the convention moves to its primary venue at the Riverview Health Arena in Noblesville.
