More than half of Joppa's high school students are in FFA.

In a school of about 75, roughly 40 are active chapter members. That's not a club. That's a culture. And the culture looks nothing like what most people assume.

"A lot of people think if I'm not a farm kid, then I can't be in it," said Jaelyn Clark, a junior who plans to double major in agricultural education and agricultural business at the University of Tennessee at Martin. "Which is not true."

Jaelyn would know. She's a horse judging competitor who has watched the dynamic play out in real time — students with no agricultural background walking into competitions and outperforming lifelong farm kids. The reason, she says, is surprisingly simple.

"I would overanalyze," she said. "While some of my friends who didn't really know how to do it would just see what I've taught them, and they're like, okay, that looks better. While I'm sitting over here analyzing."

Fresh eyes. Fewer assumptions. Sometimes that's all it takes.

Louella Lumbley's path through FFA tells a different story — one shaped by disruption and return. As a freshman, Louella traveled to the national FFA convention in Indianapolis. She was nominated as a chapter officer her sophomore year. Then personal circumstances pulled her away from Joppa halfway through the year. She spent her junior year at a different school.

This year, she came back.

"I kind of didn't get to participate in as many things with my situation," she said. "But—"

The "but" is the part that matters. She chose to return. She chose to re-enroll in the program. And what she found waiting for her was an agricultural entrepreneurship class that changed the way she thinks about business.

The class runs The Stables — a student-built, student-branded enterprise inside Joppa's FFA chapter. The name was chosen by students. The logo was designed by students. Multiple options were created, a Google survey went out schoolwide, and the student body voted on the final identity. The Stables nods to Joppa's Ranger mascot while keeping the agricultural roots intact — and it operates as a real business.

Students take custom apparel orders from the community. They create the graphic designs themselves, send them to an online transfer service called Jiffy, receive the printed transfers back, and heat-press them onto whatever shirt, size, or item the customer wants. They track inventory. They calculate costs. They manage customer relationships.

"It's a lot of public relations," Jaelyn said. "A lot of customer service."

"We learn each of the different steps and calculate how to keep our expenses in the green," Louella added.

The chapter's entrepreneurial instincts have expanded beyond T-shirts. Several students — Callie, Jasmine, and Bryce Lee among them — taught themselves crochet through YouTube tutorials and started making blankets and small animals. The first batch was raffled off for fundraising. Jasmine and Callie are now working on star-pattern blankets. The next batch may be sold outright.

Then there are the chicks.

Mr. Charlie Stubblefield — the custodian featured elsewhere in this issue — provided fertilized eggs from his own flock. Students incubated them in a unit that holds about 50 eggs. They've hatched two batches and are working on a third. Once hatched, the chicks are separated, cared for in converted storage containers that Ms. Heady has rigged into makeshift coops, and sold to the community for $3 each.

"I think we sold all of them," Jaelyn said.

The ripple effect has been real. Students who bought chicks started building coops at home. Louella's sister is raising about ten, and she and their grandpa built a chicken tractor out of PVC pipe and chicken wire.

"It helps them get into agriculture," Louella said.

FFA advisor Kenzie Heady's intro-to-ag class wanted a class pet. What they got was a livestock enterprise, a crochet side business, a custom apparel operation, and a chapter where more than half the high school participates.

Jaelyn has one more year at Joppa before heading to UT Martin. Louella graduated this spring and plans to pursue nursing — a path that seems far from agriculture until you remember that the entrepreneurship class taught her how a business works, how to manage inventory, and how to serve a customer. Those skills travel.

When asked to describe what agriculture actually is, Jaelyn didn't hesitate.

"It's the cornerstone of the world, essentially," she said. "If you want food, you want clothing, if you want tables to sit at, if you want houses to live in — that's all agriculture."

Not tractors and hay bales. Not unless you want it to be.