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This year marks the 64th annual event known as Aggie Days for the agriculture department at Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College (NEO). Aggie Days will take place March 31and April 3-4, 2015. Aggie Days host thousands of students during the Agriculture Interscholastic Contest. Students from across the four-state area will travel to the NEO campus to compete in this sweepstakes-style contest. Relatively new to Aggie Days is the addition of three Viking scholarships, which will be awarded to the high team in the sweepstakes portion of the contest. The high sweepstakes team in the single-teacher division and high sweepstakes team in the multiple-teacher division will each win three Viking scholarships that the chapter will award to seniors of their chapter for the fall of 2015. Buckles will also be awarded to the high individuals in the senior divisions of the horse judging and livestock judging contests.
Aggie Days is open to any student who is a member of 4-H or FFA. Participants range in age from third grade to high school seniors. Students will compete in a variety of agriculture-related categories. “Aggie Days is a huge tradition in the agriculture department and also across the four-state area,” said Tyler Dewey, NEO’s department chair of agriculture. “We will attract in the neighborhood of 1,500 kids that week, which makes Aggies Days one of the largest recruiting events on campus.”
Students will participate in various agriculture-related contests. “Usually Aggie Days is a prep contest for most teams before their regional or state contest. Having them on our campus and on Synar Farm gives them an idea of what it would be like to be an agriculture student at NEO,” Dewey said.
The event also enables NEO to highlight its nationally recognized agriculture programs and teams. NEO offers degrees in equine and ranch management, agriculture, natural resource ecology management and pre-veterinary science. Students from across the country travel annually to Oklahoma to be part of NEO’s agriculture program. The department has four competitive traveling teams: rodeo, horse judging, equestrian and livestock judging. Contests include: an agriculture communications contest, horse, speech, dairy, poultry, meats, farm business management and many more… Only speech contests require pre-registration. Participants need to email McKenzie Nygren at mckenzie.nygren@neo.edu and include the following info: contestant’s name, division and chapter. For more information contact Gentry Hutchison at 918-540-6368 or email gentrsh@neo.edu.
