For just one day a year, some local students choose a different ride to school to celebrate National FFA Week.
Tractors and other farm equipment lined up at the Columbus Bowling Center, off State Street, early Friday morning for the 2019 installment of Drive Your Tractor to School Day. Despite a lighter turnout than usual, the students who participated were enthusiastic about the premise.
They left the center lot at about 8 a.m. and headed to the Columbus East High School bus lot, where the farm vehicles were parked in front of the school during the day.
Henry Baxter, a 16-year-old Columbus East High School junior, drove into Columbus on a vintage 1953 Farmall owned by his family, only to have it stall just before reaching the bowling center parking lot.
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Baxter, wearing farm coveralls to stay warm, was towed into the lot by his grandfather Doyce Eckelman, of Columbus, and the two set about getting the tractor ready for the trip to East. Eckelman was checking the gas line for a blockage and thought the problem might be an electrical connection somewhere in the engine.
Baxter said he was probably about 7 years old when he learned to drive on a farm tractor, long before he was thinking about a driver’s license for a car.
Kenton Kamman, an East senior, arrived at 7:19 a.m. in style in a huge Hege sprayer, commonly used to apply substances to farm fields.
Kamman admitted that the piece of equipment was very expensive, and “by far, the nicest thing we’ve got,” he said. It was purchased for his family’s farm last year, he said.
Friday’s event was the first year FFA members were allowed to have riders on their tractors, and Kamman invited Makena Jackson, an East sophomore, to accompany him on the drive over to East.
When asked if she had ever ridden in anything like the farm equipment Kamman was driving, she said, “I have not.”
In addition to the drive over to the East bus parking lot on the farm equipment, FFA members had dress-up days at school during the week and celebration activities each night, including a barn dance hosted by the Kammans earlier this week.
