The Broken Bow Chapter of Future Farmers of America (FFA) traveled to Grand Island last week to take part in District competition with great success.
According to Broken Bow FFA Advisor Caleb tenBensel, among 43 students and 15 teams qualifying for state-level competition, Bow FFA produced four district champion teams and three individual district champions at the meet.
“The Agri-science team, which is a freshman-only competition,” said tenBensel. “We’ve actually won that four years out of my five here Broken Bow, so they’re kind of keeping up a streak for me. The Agricultural Biotechnology team was also district champion. It’s an entirely brand new team from the state champion team I had last year. We had our Natural Resources team win districts, and we also had our Food Science team win districts. In Agricultural Biotechnology we had Lily Gregoski come in first. For Agronomy, we had Madden Kleeb come in first. And then for Food Science we had Evelyn Alonzo Marin as the individual champion.”
In all, over half of tenBensel’s 72 FFA students qualified for state competition. tenBensel noted some of the qualifiers were a bit of a surprise this year, coming from areas that are normally less competitive.
“Some of the more standout performances came from the teams that weren’t necessarily the district champion teams,” tenBensel said. “We qualified a Fluoriculture team and this is the first time I’ve ever done that which is awesome but, going back in the record books Broken bow hasn’t qualified a team in Fluoriculture for state competitions since 2010. The Welding team were fourth out of 21 teams; I think about it It’s been since 2014 that we took a team to state. And my meets judging team placed fifth out of 15 in the district, and it’s been since 2007 since we took a team to state.”
The state-qualified teams aren’t done yet. The students will continue to practice their skills and study for the written elements of the competition.
“What’s really unique about these FFA competitions is that prep, it really looks different for every single event. You know, welding, they’re going to spend hours of time in the welding lab, working on pretty much any possible scenario that we could imagine at state. The Floriculture team, they worked with Bow Floral, so she got some practice working with flowers and learning from industry experts.”
With 43 students competing at the FFA State Conference, tenBensel plans to be busy in Lincoln those three days.
“Pinnacle Bank Arena is where most of the large sessions congregating state degree ceremony will be But they’ll compete all around town UNL East Campus, Southeast Community College, Nebraska Innovation Campus, several of the downtown hotels, including the Cornhusker and the Embassy. It’s a lot of running around during the week.”
The Nebraska State FFA conference runs March 25 – 27, 2026 in Lincoln.
