"Be a Leader Today"

(Preview at a story to be published later)

The arena, filled with thousands of high school students, was quiet - aside from the polite applause -when Drake Boyce, the then Oklahoma FFA Southwest District Vice President, took the stage. 

In his speech, Boyce challenged the Oklahoma FFA members the same thing his mother challenged him every day.

“From as far back as I can remember, it was always the same thing,” Boyce said. “But it didn’t matter how I felt, the conversation [with my mom] always ended with ‘Be a leader today.’”

“If this is my last address to the Oklahoma FFA, thank you for the best year of my life, and remember: be a leader.”

It, however, was not Boyce’s last address to FFA members. He was elected to serve as the 2015-2016 Oklahoma FFA Association President.

“I never really saw my life centered around agriculture,” Boyce said. “That was until my mother married a man whose life was all about it.”

Boyce’s stepfather, Chad Smith owns a feed and fertilizer store in Cheyenne, Oklahoma. When his mother married Smith, Boyce began working for his stepfather at the Smith Ag Center.

“My stepdad had honestly installed in me a work-ethic that I didn’t know I had before,” Boyce said.

                                                            

Later that year, Boyce’s involvement with agriculture continued to expand.

“Second semester of my freshman year [in high school] I enrolled in an Ag class – only because all my friends were in it,” Boyce said. “I wasn’t expecting for my life to change, but it did.”

(To be continued...)