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FFA winner seeks to refine marketing skills

Andrew Streff is one of two South Dakota FFA students who won a Proficiency Award at the recent National FFA Convention. He’s a member of the McCook Central FFA and works on 700 of his family’s 15-hundred soybean acres. He rents 28 acres of his own that he plants to soybeans. Streff says the biggest challenge is water hemp and its growing resistance to Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides. He tells Brownfield Ag News, “We have been working with my agronomist very closely to try and fight off these weeds and that’s going to help me because getting rid of the Round-Up resistant weeds will improve the nutrients that I can have in my crop and also they can get more sunlight so there’s less competition and, thus, boosting my yield.”

Streff tells Brownfield he learned the most about marketing through his Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE), “I plan to attend college with a major in Ag Marketing so I can refine the marketing skills that I’ve started to learn now. Because, I have always believed that anyone can drive a tractor and anyone can grow a crop but it takes a special individual to market their crop and make a profit off of it.”

The other National Proficiency winner from South Dakota is Derek Hight of Viburg-Hurley FFA who runs his own custom baling business.