Published: April 11, 2007 03:14 pm            

Meet the 1981-82 state FFA officer team; Members mesh to make strong unit

Originally published in the April 6, 2007, print edition.

Taking six individuals and making them one team is quite a task; making them an effective team is even a bigger task. But that was the task at hand for Patrick Duncanson, Michael Dove, Peg Zenk, George Peichel, Deborah Huiras and Patrick Daninger, who in 1981 were elected to be the Minnesota FFA officer team.

Though they were all very much individuals, they all had the bond of coming from Minnesota farms.

“We had a very good team to be on,” said Peichel, the treasurer from that team. “There were no prima donnas.”

Duncanson was humbled by being named president of the team: “We were a team ... any one of them could have been named president.”

Daninger said he’s afraid to even think of how his life would have turned out if FFA had not been offered to him. “FFA has impacted so many things in my life ... so many things have been instilled like goal-setting,” he said. “It provides a gold mine of opportunities.”

Zenk said the most valuable skill she gleaned from FFA was the ability to meet people with varied backgrounds and to be able to bring them together to work toward a common goal. “FFA really helped in developing goals — what you want to accomplish and how to do that.”

Huiras fondly looks back on the people and relationships she has due to FFA. “I’ve taken away advice, ideas, learning how not to do something,” she said. “FFA is a big ‘life laboratory.’”

Pat Duncanson, President

Pat Duncanson was a freshman at Mapleton High school when it hit him. “I remember the exact moment that I knew I wanted to do something in FFA,” Duncanson said from his home just west of Mapleton.

“I got to go to the national FFA convention as a freshman, and there I decided that I wanted someday to be on the stage of the national convention ... I remember the pride in the (agricultural) industry and the pride of wearing the blue jackets.”

After that first experience and the seed of that goal planted in the fall of his freshman year, Duncanson got down to work. That year he would be named the star Greenhand for the Mapleton chapter; then as a sophomore he was elected chapter parliamentarian; as a junior, chapter vice president and chapter president as a senior. He also spent four years in the state FFA choir.

“My initial goal was to be on the national stage, and I got to be as a senior in the National FFA choir,” he said. Duncanson also got back to the national stage when he received his American Farmer degree in 1982.

Though he dove into FFA with all his heart, not everything came easy to Duncanson. In 1980, the spring of his senior year in high school, he ran for state office, but didn’t make the slate. Instead of serving as state FFA officer, Duncanson took his talents to Colombia through the Work Experience Abroad program, where he spent five months in a high school to develop youth programs working with the counterpart to the U.S. FFA.

Duncanson credits his experience in Colombia with giving him the drive to try again for state FFA office. “If I wouldn’t have gone to Colombia, I don’t think that I would have been elected president. I had grown as a person.”

Duncanson is a firm believer in the adage that the “decisions we make, the path we take, determines the life you live.”

In choosing FFA, and the leadership opportunities the organization offered, Duncanson set a path he is still on today. “Leadership gave me the confidence to go to the U (University of Minnesota), and because of the U I took an internship to D.C., and that’s where I met Kristin (Pat’s wife).”

Duncanson still remembers the impact that FFA had on his life, but he still displays only two awards — his Star Greenhand and American Farmer charms.

“They were the beginning and the culmination” of his FFA career.

Though he put a lot of effort into his FFA career, he isn’t bold enough to say he did it on his own.

“None of this would have been possible without my parents,” he said. “My dad (Dale) was a very good agriculturist and mom (Mary) was happy to be involved. They both encouraged me to get involved, they allowed me to be involved, and they guided me.”

The Duncansons are still strong supporters of the Maple River FFA Chapter, with the Duncanson FFA Scholarship.

Duncanson also had the guidance of high school ag advisers Dan Perkins and Brian Weness, as well as the familial trailblazing of older brother Karl who achieved his state FFA degree.

“Bill Pfeffer (Mapleton FFA member) was up for his, I believe, state farmer degree when I was a freshman,” he said. “That gave me further proof that I could also do something if I wanted to.”

Pat and Karl are partners in Duncanson Growers, raising corn, soybeans, cattle and contract feeding hogs.

Pat and Kristin have Ben, a senior; Claire, freshman; Sam, sixth grader and Gabe, a fifth grader, all in the Maple River School District.

Michael Dove, Vice President

Mike Dove remembers his Appleton High School FFA adviser Paul Redman for opening up the world of FFA to him. “Here this guy from Cornell University comes to Appleton, Minn., to teach agriculture,” he said. Dove credits Redman with the dedication to come to Minnesota, so he figured why not put in the dedication of his own to make the most of his own FFA career.

Dove found himself a chance to speak, competing in the extemporaneous speaking contest at the state level, as well as being on the farm business management team. “I knew I wanted to go into business.”

He also credits the support of parents — Sherwood and Janice — for helping him down the road of leadership in FFA. “They encouraged me to take the steps that I needed to.”

One of those steps was not giving up after a failed bid for state office in the spring of his senior year, 1980.

Part of the reason he didn’t give up was an impression he got when he attended the Washington Leadership Conference between his junior and senior year in high school. “I remember seeing Bob Thell (state FFA president 1978-79), and the way he conducted himself, and I knew I wanted to be a part of that.”

Obviously, he came back a year later and achieved his goal of becoming the Minnesota FFA vice president.

In addition to his FFA leadership, Dove was also able to use his talent to make both the state and national FFA choirs.

Knowing he wanted to be in business, Dove graduated from the U of M in 1984 with an ag business degree. He was a sales representative for Monsanto in the Montevideo area for three years. “We sold a lot of Roundup for weed control on the set-aside acres at the time.”

After the three years with Monsanto, Dove went back to school, to the Hamline University School of Law, with an emphasis in ag law. After three years in law school, he got a job clerking for federal bankruptcy judge Gregory F. Kishel.

With the experience he gained during two years with Kishel, Dove took the opportunity in April 1993 to join what is now the Gislason & Hunter law firm in New Ulm.

In addition to bankruptcy work, when Dove first came to the New Ulm law firm a lot of his time was spent on permitting work for hog feedlots, “but now counties and townships have their standards for setbacks and such that it’s all pretty cut and dry — either your feedlot plan meets the criteria or it doesn’t.”

Now his workload is about half bankruptcy work and half representing producers, with some estate work.

As a lawyer, he has to exude confidence, and he said that would not be possible without his FFA experience. “I learned a lot (in FFA),” he said. “Having the chance to speak in front of people and gaining confidence to do that really helped me.”

Thinking back to his days in the Appleton FFA chapter, he believes his highest office was that of chapter treasurer. “That just shows that you don’t have to have the highest local office to be able to achieve higher goals.”

In addition to life lessons, FFA also provided Dove with a life partner — Deb Huiras, who was the state reporter on the same team.

Peg Zenk-Bitter, Secretary

Seeing her older brother Steve flourish in FFA had a direct impact on Peg Zenk when it came time for her to decide about her FFA plans.

“Steve was pretty direct,” she said of her older brother who was the Sentinel on the 1979-80 state officer team. “He basically said ‘you’re going to be in FFA and you’re going to take ag classes.’ So I was willing to give it a try, and I enjoyed it once I got into it.”

Seeing Steve become a state officer and “seeing him enjoy that year motivated me to think I could do it and wanted to try it.” She was also motivated by Steve’s fellow state officers, “as well as those state officers before him and after him,” she said. “I enjoyed meeting people, and the public speaking ... it seemed to be a natural fit for me.”

In addition to big brother Steve’s influence, Peg can’t deny the influence of Danube FFA advisers such as Glen Christianson and Alan Spier. Zenk-Bitter said Christianson, her adviser when she was a freshman, encouraged involvement, and to “try one thing. ... I dove right in as a freshman. I had been in 4-H and that was good training ground, it got me in the right mentality.”

That first year she won the state creed speaking contest, and was able to attend the national FFA convention.

She never looked back after that.

She held parliamentarian and vice president spots in her chapter, and then was a part of the district officer team before coming regional president during her senior year in high school. In April of that year, 1981, she ran for state FFA office and was elected secretary.

“That time as regional president was invaluable,” she said. “It put me in more contact with the state officer team, gave me more hands-on exposure knowing how things worked.”

Zenk-Bitter attended Willmar Community College the year she served as state secretary. “If anything needed to be done in western Minnesota, I was there.”

A year later she transferred to the University of Minnesota St. Paul campus to pursue a degree in agricultural journalism. “If I wanted to get into J school, I realized that I needed to get into the U of M system.”

After three years at the U of M, she was offered a job with Hog Farm Management magazine, but that job would have to wait for an FFA commitment — working the Washington, D.C., Leadership Conference the summer of 1985. “They were really good at Miller Publishing. They held the job for me until that fall so I could work the Washington conference.”

After a year at Hog Farm Management, she spent about a year at Cenex, before traveling Europe.

In 1987 she went to work for Farm Industry News, and stayed there until 1996, when her husband, Michael, was finishing his doctorate, so the couple moved to Hawaii for a year.

After that year of living in the Aloha State, they moved back to Minneapolis when Zenk-Bitter caught on with Colle-McVoy, working in public relations. “I really enjoyed the agency,” she said. “It was really good exposure.” She stayed with Colle-McVoy until 1999.

As aloha means both hello and goodbye, the family was able to use both meanings once again as Michael took a position as a history professor at the University of Hawaii-Hilo.

“When we had visited here before, we thought we’d like to retire here, and here we are,” she said.

From an ag journalism standpoint, Zenk-Bitter has the best of both worlds — being able to do something she truly loves, and being able to do it in a beautiful location like Hawaii.

The exposure she got while on the mainland has benefited her when she’s sitting on a tropical island. “I’ve kept a lot of the ties I had made while at Colle-McVoy ... CHS is one of my main clients here, and I still do work for Farm Industry News.” She claims she misses being able to meet her sources face to face, but with today’s technology, you can telecommunicate from anywhere in the world.

She claims the time difference between Hawaii and the lower 48 states has actually benefited her. “When I worked with Rooster.com, I was able to talk to them at the end of their work day, which was about mid-day for me, so I would be able to work on things and get them updated on the web before they got to work the next day.”

Though she may be in the middle of an ocean, she sees a sea of opportunity for herself and her children in a world of agriculture. She plans to encourage son Alex, 13, to take up FFA in another year. In the time being, Michael, Peg, Alex and Ana, 9, have grabbed their own little bit of tropical agriculture — 8 acres of tropical fruit trees and flowers that Zenk-Bitter calls her back-up plan.

The way things are going for her, this will be more of a supplement than a back-up plan.

As she covers agriculture as a writer and works in it herself, she feels that the value of ag has not lessened. “Ag business is always looking for people with ag backgrounds; there are great opportunities.” These are opportunities that Zenk-Bitter doesn’t feel would have been opened to her without FFA.

“I knew in high school that I wanted to be in journalism, but I never thought that I’d be in agriculture at this stage in my life,” she said. “There was a point where I thought I should get out of ag, but I think ag is what gave me my edge.”

George Peichel, Treasurer

Mr. Peichel goes to Washington; Mr. Peichel comes back seeking leadership roles.

“It wasn’t until I went to the Washington Leadership Conference after my senior year that I really thought about running for a state office,” Peichel said. “The seed had been planted by Rich Beltz (Fairfax High School FFA adviser), but it wasn’t until that conference that I seriously thought about it.”

A part of the Washington conference was to have FFA members set goals, and Peichel set becoming a state FFA officer as one of his.

At the end of his freshman year at the University of Minnesota-Waseca, Peichel ran for state office, but didn’t make the slate. Rather than giving up he came back a year later to try again. That determination paid off as he became state FFA treasurer as he was finishing his second year at UMW.

With the state treasurer position to call his own, Peichel transferred to the University of Minnesota at St. Paul. He graduated in December 1983 with an ag education degree, but never taught a day of high school agriculture.

“At that time there weren’t a lot of teaching jobs available,” he said. Rather than teaching lessons, Peichel found himself on the learning side of life as he became a loan officer in the Kasson office of Production Credit Association.

“I learned a lot of lessons during those two years,” he said of his time in Kasson which coincided with the agriculture crisis of the mid-’80s.

He then moved into the Farm Credit Services office New Ulm, once again as a loan officer.

In 1994, while at FCS he became associated with a young hog producer named Bob Christensen. “He had a couple hundred sows when I was his loan officer,” Peichel said of his hog-raising client. Christensen Family Farms has since grown to become one of the five largest producers of pork in the United States, with operations in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and Illinois, according to the CF website.

This early association with Christensen has paid off for Peichel who went to work for Christensen in a business development position, “where I worked with contract growers.” That position has evolved into Peichel’s current position as CF’s director of treasury and finance.

Not only is Peichel the top CF financial officer, he and his wife Mary also are contract growers for CF. This connection has helped Peichel maintain a tight agriculture connection and, as a result, a close-tie with the FFA of today.

The Peichels’ oldest daughter, Rebecca, is a freshman at St. Benedict, and she plans to run for state FFA office at this spring’s state FFA convention, after not making the final slate of officers last year.

The elder Peichel said he sees something in Rebecca, maybe something from his inner-self that makes him think she has leadership qualities that can flourish in FFA. “In the case of Rebecca, I pushed her” to pursue FFA involvement, he said. “She’s a natural leader. ... it didn’t take a lot of pushing.”

Son, Edward, has also followed dad’s footsteps into FFA, and as a freshman at Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop High School he won the regional creed speaking contest, and his mechanized agriculture team had just taken second in the region.

Though it’s still too early to see if daughter Anna, a GFW fourth grader, will follow in the FFA footsteps, she has indicated that she wants to be a veterinarian.

Aside from helping with the FFA cause within his own home, Peichel also does his share for FFA in his community. He serves on both the boards of the state FFA Alumni Association as well as the state FFA Foundation, and is currently the president of the GFW alumni chapter.

He also credits his employer, Bob Christensen of CF, as being a supporter of youth ag programs. “Bob sees the importance of supporting both FFA and 4-H locally, as well as on a state level,” he said, using the example of the Christensen stage at the new Miracle of Birth Center at the State Fair.

“I purposely have made an effort to give something back to FFA,” Peichel said. “I’m a little selfish because I now have children involved, but I’ve seen the importance of the FFA in my life.”

In addition to his leadership qualities that have followed throughout his life, another part has been maintained as a part of the family.

One of his FFA projects was actually an extension of something his grandfather had started back in the 1950s — Peichel’s Hill, a private park on the family’s farm. “My project was the upkeep of the park; building a shelter and wiring the shelter,” he said. The park, overlooking the Minnesota River Valley, is used by groups such as the Knights of Columbus, Jaycees and Lutheran Brotherhood, in addition to the family.

Deborah (Huiras) Dove, Reporter

Deborah Huiras’ FFA career started when she and a number of her farm girlfriends at Sleepy Eye High School decided to “take over the chapter” as she puts it.

Prior to that there were only a few females in the local chapter. She credits the adviser at the time, Larry Baumgard, with fostering the FFA involvement in herself and her friends.

Growing up on the hog farm of her parents, Jerome and Dorothy, she saw the importance of agriculture, and in FFA she saw the importance of leadership.

At the end of her senior year in high school, 1980, she ran for state office, but did not make it. While she was a regional officer, she became friends with Bonnie Bianchi, a member of the 1980-81 state FFA team. That friendship and living with Susan Bronk, a member of the 1979-80 state officer team, at the U of M kept her on the path to pursuing a state FFA office. “Susan really encouraged me, as did Brad Schloesser and Mike (Dove).”

All that encouragement paid off as she came back a year later and accomplished her goal of obtaining a state FFA office.

Deborah fondly recalls that year on the state FFA team, but more fondly recalls the people she served with. “Everybody brought something different to the team, but everyone had a great sense of humor,” she said. “You needed to have that when you work so closely with each other for that long.”

She has maintained her sense of humor, even when she worked through what she calls “intense” times as a bank examiner.

After graduating from the University of Minnesota with an ag business degree, she became a bank examiner for the state of Minnesota in Montevideo. “That was in 1984 and I worked at that for about three years,” she said. “That was in the middle of the farm crisis and we had to close four or five banks in that time. It was pretty intense ... it was long enough.”

She then went to work at Richfield Bank and Trust for five years until 1993, when she and Mike moved to New Ulm and she became an ag lender at State Bank and Trust (now Frandsen Bank & Trust). She stayed there until two years ago, where her heart turned from lending to learning.

She has been taking classes at Minnesota State University, Mankato, to become a social studies teacher. She is in her last semester of classes and will be student teaching in the fall.

Even in her current studies she has seen the benefit of her FFA experience. “I can see how I design lesson plans differently than the other students,” she said. “I have more oral presentations than my fellow students have in their plans. I think that’s due to FFA. I want my students to be comfortable and have the confidence to speak in front of people.”

She tries to instill those lessons in her and Mike’s sons, Joshua and Jory; whether it be in 4-H or for science fair projects, she wants her boys to be comfortable in front of their peers.

Pat Daninger, Sentinel

Pat Daninger was at a fork in his road of life when he ran for state FFA office in the spring of 1981, his senior year at Forest Lake High School.

“If I hadn’t been elected to state FFA office, I would have gone into the Marine Corps. I had my mind made up that if I didn’t get elected that that’s what I was going to do.”

Obviously, since he’s featured in this story, he got elected as state FFA Sentinel, and a military life was not to be.

Daninger first got bit by the FFA leadership bug when he attended the Greenhand Camp after his freshman year. “I got to meet the state officers who ran the camp and that really lead to my getting involved.”

Daninger was elected chapter president as a sophomore. Then when he attended the Washington Leadership Conference, he got bit again. “That whole experience in Washington was just awesome ... I’m kind of a history buff, so seeing all the buildings and all the history was really big for me,” he said. “That just lit the fire in me. ... I don’t remember how, but they taught that you could achieve whatever you wanted.”

In addition to Greenhand Camp and the WLC, Daninger credits Forest Lake Adviser Lee Sandager with offering a “harsh push.”

“He was the most influential teacher I had; he stressed that whatever you’re doing, get organized,” Daninger said. “When he saw potential he pushed you. ... no one knows what they can do unless they’re pushed.”

Encouragement from his parents, Florence and Mike, also helped him down the path to FFA leadership.

“To run for state office, we needed a consent form from our parents, and when I asked my dad, I remember him saying that I’d probably get in if I tried it. I took that as a high compliment,” he said.

He laughs as he recalls his father once hearing that FFA stood for “Father Farms Alone,” and “after I got elected to state office he found out that it was true, and he’d remind me of that pretty often.”

Daninger has now been on the giving end of some of those pushes. “I tried to give more than a gentle nudge to Luke,” he said of his 17-year-old son. The elder Daninger said Luke has really taken an interest in the parliamentary procedure of FFA and daughter Erin, 15, “just loves working with dairy cattle.” Actually, he said all four his children, including Nathan, 13, and Mariah, 11, enjoy showing dairy cattle. So far, the younger two have only shown in 4-H arenas.

Daninger admits to also giving “the nudge” to other youth in the area, in particular a neighbor boy who works on the Daninger dairy farm. “I give the kids the sales pitch, then I tell the teachers that I’m working on the kids, so they take it from there.”

Giving back to the community is also important to Daninger, and he has served on the Forest Lake ag advisory committee since he left his state FFA office in the spring of 1982.

The Daningers run a 60-head registered Holstein herd, in addition to 250 acres of hay, corn silage and rotational grazing with the cows. The family is in the process of starting an on-farm production facility where they would produce fluid milk, cream and butter, with the intent of tapping into the Twin Cities market.

“It’s exciting and scary at the same time” he said. Pulling from his FFA days, Daninger said this project has called for goal setting, determining what needs to be done and when, and “it really gave me the confidence to go do the sales pitch to stores.”

Daninger said he doesn’t even want to think about where he’d be had FFA not been a part of his life. As mentioned before, if he had not been elected to state office, he may have become a Marine.

He also met his wife, Sharlene, during the year that he spent as state FFA Sentinel.

Words of advice

These six individuals you have just read about have a lot in common, but mostly they have the common bond of being impacted by FFA. They’ve lived what they preached so many years ago. Now as they look back, what can they provide the youth wearing the blue corduroys today?

“The ag industry has changed so much over the years,” said Mike Dove. “The career opportunities are greater now and the skills you can learn. ... you don’t have to be a state officer to achieve all of this ... this is your ticket to learn a lot.”

Zenk-Bitter speaks from experience of the opportunities that FFA provided her. She doubts that she would have gone into agricultural journalism if it had not been for her FFA involvement, and through ag journalism she has covered some heavy hitters. “Visiting with Norman Borlaug, which was pretty impressive, happened because I went the ag path. ... in my early days I remember visiting with the Andreas brothers (of ADM) before they were this big, and they gave me time.”

Peichel encourages young FFAers to do whatever they can to get to the state Greenhand leadership camp to get the FFA ball rolling in their lives. “Anyone can achieve really great heights in this organization ... what you put in, you will get out of it.”

Duncanson sees the FFA organization as a “great opportunity to develop leadership skills to take you through your adult life. ... I know FFA did tons more for me than I did for it.”

        

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