Wawasee Soils Team Advances to Nationals
Published: Friday, May 7, 2021
The members of the Wawasee High School FFA soils team looked over the grassy slope behind the Warriors' football stadium like four farmers a generation or two older.
Flinty-eyed beneath the bills on their ball caps. Silently contemplative. Stoic.
"They have a maturity about them that helps a lot," said Brad Clayton, who was coaching the team up last week Thursday after school. "One will go, 'What do you think?' And then another says, 'Well, what do you think?'
"Sometimes I look at them and say, 'Guys, are you 16, 17, or are you 55?', because I can't tell the difference sometimes."
The answer became evident a few minutes later when a white cat emerged from nearby bushes and Justin Mullet, brothers Justin and Jared Beer, and Cade Beer, who is believed to be a third cousin, broke out in age-appropriate silliness.
The soils team was practicing for the National Soil and Land Contest held this week in Oklahoma City. This is decidedly a non-contact event and the drills lie somewhere between a basketball walk-through and a spelling bee warmup.
Cade Beer, the only soils teamer who also competes for Wawasee athletics—in soccer and track and field—said soils judging "is a competition, so it's sort of like a game but it's not a sport. It's a mental sport."
"It's a nerd game," Jared Beer, a sophomore, interjected dryly.
Whichever way it's described, there's no denying the educational experience FFA participation in something as earthy as soil judging has afforded the foursome, and the doors it may open down the road.
The Beer brothers help out on their family's row crop and dairy beef cattle and their father, Marc, also owns Beer's Lawn Installation in Milford. Soil judging is an everyday thing for them.
"You don't really think about the rules and stuff (on the farm), but you do the concepts," Justin Beer, a Wawasee senior, said prior to the trip. "My dad made national soils twice and he said it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so I'm excited about that."
Wawasee won the area soils contest to advance to the state competition, where it qualified for the national event along with 10 other Indiana FFAs including: Lewis Cass, Rochester and soil judging powers Tippecanoe Valley and North Miami.
"You might as well try hard when you're down there, but the fun experience is going to be the rest of the trip," said Jared Beer.
Mullet, who does crop scouting and other odd farm jobs for Clunette Elevator, was pretty sure he'd come away from the experience with new "life skills."
Wawasee last competed for a national title in 2017.
"We typically take a team every two to four years," said Mariah Roberts, Wawasee High School agriculture instructor and FFA adviser. "Wawasee has a long, proud history of going to national contests. There's a lot of competition in soils contest statewide and we're really proud that these guys have stayed committed, learned and continued to hone their skills.
"For some students, traveling out of state widens their eyes because they've never been so far from home. It gives them an opportunity to see some scenery that's not what we see here in Indiana. We often fly, and to give many that experience for the first time is special."
The team departed Fort Wayne International Airport on Sunday afternoon and checked into a hotel later that night.
Cade Beer, whose family raises row crops and hogs, had flown previously to Florida and Oregon, and Justin Beer experienced his first commercial flight when he was 3, but it was the first time on a plane for Jared Beer and Mullet, who would have preferred to travel in a mini-van.
"My dad was watching air disasters (on TV) a couple days ago and I'm like, 'Dude, really? We're a week away from flying and we're watching this?' "Mullet said with a laugh.
Roberts said the trip was funded by sponsors in the Syracuse-area ag community, Wawasee FFA's main fundraiser in which each member auctions off eight hours of labor of the bidder's choosing (raking leaves, taking down Christmas lights and the like), family contributions and school funds.
On Monday, the team practiced at Kickapoo Friends Mission farm, had rules practice at Oklahoma State University, took part in study hall for their regular classes, enjoyed a barbeque dinner, toured a stockyard and visited the Oklahoma City National Memorial.
The team practiced on Tuesday at the competition site, Redlands Community College, and at historic Fort Reno, viewed Angus cattle and black Clydesdales at Express Ranches, and had supper at legendary Cattlemen's Steakhouse before study hall and more rules practice.
As the Exchange went to press, the national finals were scheduled to take place bright and early on Wednesday, to be followed by more study hall and the awards banquet at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. The team was schedule to return on Thursday.
Clayton, a volunteer coach who served as the male chaperone on the trip, credits his decision to attend Oklahoma State University and his career as the manager of the Clayton Garden Center in North Webster to the trip he made to the 2003 nationals with the Wawasee soils team.
"This means you're one of the top judging teams in the state," said Clayton, who is also a conservationist for the Watershed Foundation in North Webster. "I had a lot of friends on judging teams at other schools that could never get to nationals, so it's a prestigious honor.
"It influenced my life big time because that's when I decided where to go to college. Growing up here, everybody went to Purdue, but after I went out there, I basically fell in love with Oklahoma State and decided that's where I wanted to be."
The skills and knowledge gained from being on the soil team are used every day by farmers, agronomists, landscapers, and anybody else who moves dirt around for septic systems, lagoons, homesites and the like.
Clayton had the team practice slope identification, using terms such as "rise over run." Many farmers do this intuitively to determine if the side of a hill is safe enough to plant and harvest with equipment, or may better suited for grazing or left alone to grow naturally. Soils judging also includes permeability, texture surface, erosion, surface runoff, shrink-swell, water table, flooding and final evaluation.
"Some are better at the rules part, where we have to figure out land-management practices, some are good at the texture part and some are better at figuring out that slope," Clayton said. "You've got a good soils team when you've got those things that complement each other. If somebody's off with their slope, maybe somebody else made up for it with their rules. It kind of balances out."
Unlike competitions in Indiana, the team wasn't allowed to use graph-like slope finders in the national contest, so they practiced "eyeballing" the angle of the test site.
They were required to determine soil depth, which is important when it comes judging if land can be successfully planted with crops, without the use of a measuring tape. It helped team members, therefore, to know the dimension of their clipboards.
They also practiced soil texture on samples that came from Oklahoma. The dirt ranged from as coarse as beach sand to as fine as talcum power.
"This will be good experience that will help me for the future," said Cade Beer. "Being able to do it with close friends is pretty cool."
Return to Top of Page