The 94th National FFA Convention will officially begin about noon today in Indianapolis and run through mid-afternoon on Saturday. Three hundred to 400 Wisconsin FFA members, advisors, chaperones, award winners and guests will be at this year’s event. Convention activities started last weekend with phase one of the national officer candidate interviews. Thirty-seven candidates started at that session, with the field whittled down to the final 21 by Monday night. In that field of 21 is Courtney Zimmerman of the Spencer FFA who will go through more interviews leading up to the naming of the new six-person national officer team at that final session on Saturday afternoon.
The 30th annual Tri-National Agricultural Accord meetings are under way this week — both virtually and live from Arlington, Virginia. The accord is a chance for senior agricultural officials from the U.S., Mexico and Canada to work together on trade and development issues. Their focus this week is on trade harmonization and rural development in the three countries. Officials from the three countries are expected to sign a communiqué later today, outlining their accomplishments during this week’s meetings.
A farmer from Lake Park, Minnesota is in trouble with the feds. Kevin Jon Nelson, a corn and soybean farmer, has pled guilty to one count of making a false statement to the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation regarding how much he lost in crop failures in 2018 and 2019. Nelson falsely received insurance payments of over $548,000 for his supposed losses. But he got caught lying and could have faced up to 30 years in prison and more than $1 million dollars in fines. The government has accepted his guilty plea, but he still could get a couple years in jail and fines up to $95,000 and he must pay back all the money the government sent him as insurance coverage and agree not to participate in any future USDA farm programs.
Culver’s restaurants are reporting a busy day on Oct. 15, which was national cheese curd day. At their 800 stores across the country, Culver’s sold 136,000 Curderburgers. Culver’s officials say that at their Wisconsin restaurants they sold about 94 of the sandwiches each hour — more than three times the sales rate for regular burgers on a normal day.
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