On Wednesday, November 16 the young ladies at Greeley West High School in FFA and any other girls taking horticulture and agriculture classes went to the Aspire to Grow leadership conference for women in agriculture. The conference was an all-day event that lasted from 7:15 a.m. to 3 p.m. which was presented by Agrium and the Colorado FFA Foundation at the CoBank Center for Agricultural Education in Fort Collins.

Key note speaker Nikki Weathers of Weathers Farms and Monsanto’s Southwest Region Mom of the Year award winner presented and gave the aspiring FFA leaders encouragement and advice. The conference itself was broken into sections after the keynote speakers were done, as the three main sections for discussion were crop production & plant science, livestock & animal production, and agribusiness & policy.

It wasn’t just the people presenting and speaking that had work to do, however, as the women attending the conference had an assignment after lunch which involved using teamwork to solve and present a problematic agricultural situation. The last event of the conference was taping up leafs on the windows to make interconnected vines, each leaf representing a woman who attended.