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MILLERSTOWN – Libby Baker-Mikesell is a star in Agriscience.
The Port Royal teen who attends Greenwood High School and serves as president of the school’s FFA chapter was awarded the Pennsylvania FFA State Star Award for her region.
Libby is one of four winners within the state that represent the four regions. Libby represents the South Central Region.
The State Star Award is the most prestigious award an FFA member can earn for his or her supervised agriculture experience, or SAE in one of four categories.
Categories include Agribusiness, Agricultural Placement, Agricultural Production and Agricultural Science, or Agriscience. Libby was given top honor in the Agriscience category.
Libby had been progressing on a project she began in ninth grade at Greenwood in her Agriscience class. Her project involved manure composting and won her second place in the National FFA Agriscience Fair in 2013 Environmental Services and Natural Resource Systems Division I.
Libby has competed in every National Agriscience Fair in which she was able. This past fall she placed second, earning a silver medal. Classmate Corissa Wagner also placed second at the national fair, earning a silver medal.
The project, which earned Libby a gold medal in 2013, involved identifying problems on her family’s Port Royal farm “with compost issues and how to amend soils and grow more forage,” Libby said.
Her last two efforts involved the effects from the Chesapeake Bay Watershed and run off. Last year she tested to see if water soluble phosphorous would leave as run off and pollute the system by adding gypsum to the compost.
“This year I focused on the Chesapeake Bay itself and other ways to decrease phosphorous,” by growing different crops to see which one would take up the most phosphorous and decrease the substance in the fields. We planted oats, buckwheat and sorghum sudan grass,” Libby said, and she correctly predicted the sorghum sudan grass would produce the highest phosphorous level.
This recent study landed Libby a Best in Show at the Farm Show in the Agriscience Fair this month.
In order to be named State Star in her category, Libby had to take part in a 40- minute interview at the Farm Show. She beat out four other agriscience competitors.
Also representing the Southcentral Region were Greenwood students Ryan McVitty who competed in Agricultural Business, while classmate Zak Range competed in Agricultural Placement.
Another local student, Jackie Arbogast of the Midd-West High School chapter, represented the Northern region in Agricultural Production.
Libby was recently accepted to Penn State University for the fall 2016 semester majoring in agricultural education with a double minor in environmental systems and religious studies. Libby noted she has an opportunity to achieve a state FFA office after graduation from Greenwood this summer. If she should earn a position, she will take a year to travel the state with the FFA officers and start PSU in 2017. Her goal is to become a high school agriculture teacher and FFA advisor.