By Steve Dallape

Senior Mason Laird has always been an outdoors person. He remembers that his parents “really instilled the love and appreciation of the wilderness and agriculture” in young Mason and his older brother, and they grew up hunting and fishing around their home in Villa Ridge. “We could always go outside in the woods and just explore,” he recalled.

That love of and respect for the outdoors has remained a part of Mason’s life to the present day. He serves as the president of the Meridian Chapter of the National FFA Organization, and recently became just the fifth person in Meridian FFA history to receive the State FFA Degree. The State Degree is the fourth highest of the five Degrees that FFA awards, and is earned by those who satisfy a number of strict requirements, including in-school instruction, extracurricular work in a Supervised Agricultural Experience, maintenance of a satisfactory academic record and a high level of involvement in local FFA activities.

Given Mason’s level of involvement in FFA, it might come as no surprise that he plans on a career in agriculture after high school. But if you assumed that he aspires to become a farmer, you would be mistaken. Agribusiness is one of our country’s largest and most critical industries, and the careers one can pursue in agriculture are many and varied. Rather than focusing on the production side of the business, Mason is looking toward the equally important transportation sector. In the short term, he hopes to earn a position with Canadian National Railway that will allow him to enter their in-house training program and eventually become an engineer, driving the trains that take the harvests of America’s farmers to market.

A career in rail transport would likely take Mason all over the country, but he would eventually like to make his home base in Missouri or Kentucky. For now, though, Mason likes the closeness of the Meridian community. “Since it’s such a small school, you know everybody,” he says. In fact, he has known his FFA advisor, Erin Ruiz, since he was two or three years old. He credits her with helping him achieve much of the success that he has, and believes that their easy rapport would not be possible if they had not known each other for so long.

Besides agriculture, Mason’s other favorite subject is history, and he believes that “you can always learn something from the past.” Maybe that’s why he is interested in the ancient art of metal smithing. He makes knives, small trinkets like coat hooks and decorative initials, and even tools for his shop. But metal smithing is only one of the many useful skills, like welding and carpentry, his father has taught him. “That’s one thing my dad always taught us — to be as self-sufficient as possible,” he said. “It’s better to know a little bit about everything than to know everything about one thing.”

It should be evident that Mason is no stranger to hard work. Maybe that’s why, if given the power to do anything at all, he would make it so that no one in his family had to work, if they didn’t want to. But, it’s difficult to imagine Mason living a life of leisure. It seems that much hard work, and the success it can bring, is in his future.