You don't have to be lonely.

If you know me from my prior life, BF (Before Farming), there are probably things you never thought you'd hear me say. And this is one of them: I am the newly elected chair of the 2014 Kansas Farm Bureau YF&R Conference. {pause for a moment of shock and awe}YF&R stands for Young Farmers & Ranchers and is a group of hard-working agriculture professionals dedicated to developing their leadership skills and empowering others to become actively involved in agriculture advocacy, promotion and education (I stole that from the website).

But before I get ahead of myself, let's talk about how this all came to pass. Farmer Tim and I were appointed to serve a two year term on the state YF&R committee, beginning December 2012. We represent the young(er) voice of the Kansas Farm Bureau and are a committee within the organization. We serve alongside nine other couples from around the state; and are divided into 10 districts, each one consisting of 10 or 11 Kansas counties so all 105 are represented. During our term, we support and help run the 2013 conference (which just happened this last weekend), meet quarterly-ish, have monthly-ish phone conferences and produce a conference of our own in 2014.

The conference we just attended for 2013 was great for a few reasons:

1. We had record attendance at 535!!! That's a lot of people ages 18-35 in one room. We even had to start turning people away, which in my humble opinion, is a good problem.
2. The conference shirts were PURPLE.

3. Our two keynote speakers were awesome! Thanks, Andrew McCrea and Dr. Dan Thomson!

4. And finally, we introduced the committee's fearless leader, Jeff Sutton, to farmersonly.com. If you aren't familiar, you should be. I have conveniently provided their commercial here for you. You're welcome.

To those on the committee in their second year, who put this show together- Symns, Fosters, Schmidts, Alpers and Joneses- thank you for showing us the ropes and providing a great example for what to expect next year!! And speaking of next year...this is where my fun begins. I get to impose share my love for all things organization and help plan for 2014. After spending the weekend with my fellow first years, I have the utmost respect and appreciation for the way in which they all stepped up and helped out in any way that was needed. 2014 is sure to be great as I know there are already some great ideas for speakers we'd like to bring in and topics we'd like to see discussed. I thought Jeff was just being cheesy when he said we'd make lifelong friends being on the committee; but I actually think he was right (but don't tell him I said that). Wish us luck and we hope to see you in attendance!

And in case I wasn't compelling enough, below is another attempt to convince you that YF&R is awesome.