Petaluma FFA champs will head to international competition

Petaluma High School will send its state champion Future Farmers of America team to an international competition in Scotland next summer after the foursome took second place in nationals.

It marks the first time any school in Sonoma County has sent a team to the annual international competition, said Kim Arntz, Petaluma's agriculture department chair.

“This is the highest we have ever gotten,” she said.

Mandy Brazil, Sam Cheda, Kelli Carstensen and Rocco Cunningham placed second among 43 teams in the national finals in the dairy cattle evaluation competition in Indianapolis last month, earning an invitation to the Royal Highland Show in Scotland in June.

“I'm pumped,” said Sam Cheda, one of three team members who graduated from Petaluma last spring and who are now freshmen studying agriculture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. The fourth team member, Cunningham, is a Petaluma senior this year.

It is the sixth time Petaluma has sent a team to the national competition and the first time a group has made it to the international contest.

The Royal Highland Show in Scotland draws competitors from around the globe and scores of people turn out to watch the competition. The 2009 show broke attendance records with more than 176,500 visitors.

Students will pay there own way to the June 24-27 competition so will engage in fund-raising activities to try to help with the cost.

In Indianapolis, Brazil finished fifth, Cheda eighth and Carstensen 9th, in the overall individual dairy cattle evaluation scores. All four Trojans scored high enough to earn gold medals.

“We are really proud of our students, and even our graduates, and what they accomplished,” Petaluma principal Brian Howard said. “They are carrying the Petaluma tradition forward. It's really nice.”

The group, who won the California competition held in San Luis Obispo last May, placed second overall out of 43 teams in the dairy evaluation competition at nationals in October. The team from Illinois won.

What made the feat remarkable, said team coach Dominic Grossi of Novato, is that the structure of the national contest is considerably different from the state competition, meaning the students had to absorb a host of new information before heading to the Midwest.

“It's pretty incredible that they could take all these new problems after state and learn how to do all of them,” Grossi said.

It's a talented group, Grossi said.

“I knew they were really good,” he said. “I probably expected them in the top six or seven.”

“It was pretty awesome for us,” said Carstensen. “It was amazing. We never expected to do that well, having to learn all this new stuff.”

In the two-day competition, dairy evaluation teams completed a series of skills including animal evaluations, oral arguments to support their findings, rating an animal's lineage and other industry skills.

In addition to a second place team finish, Brazil beat out about 170 students to take first in the oral reasons category in which competitors are asked to defend their cow ratings in front of a judge.

“I have been judging since I was about eight years old,” the Cal Poly freshman said. “I'm usually pretty good, but I didn't think I would be that good.”

The team members down at Cal Poly will practice their evaluation skills during the school year through the agriculture department on campus and meet up with Grossi and Cunningham during school breaks and other visits to Petaluma.

Grossi vowed not to push the team too hard.

“This is an opportunity of a lifetime,” he said. “We don't have to reinvent the wheel with these kids.”