Tayten Salzwedel entered Iola High School nearly four years ago, uncertain where his path would lead.
“I wanted to be involved somehow, but none of the sports really seemed like my kind of thing,” he recalled.
Same went for other clubs and organizations, except for one — FFA.
“I’d taken an intro to FFA in a class in middle school, and I kind of liked it,” he said. “But mainly, my cousin, who I’m very close with, was an FFA member, and she really got me involved.”
Since then, Salzwedel has thrived under the FFA umbrella, embarking on three separate supervised experiences, also known as SAEs,which allows students to use experiences gained through FFA in real-world applications.
As a freshman, Salzwedel, son of Summer Salzwedel and Jacob Potter, has started and sustained his own garden, filled with an assortment of vegetables, wild plants and perennials.
He also began raising meat rabbits, which required him to build his own pin (twice) and learn multitudes about the nutritional content of rabbits, how to process an animal, and finally the panning process to create his own pelts.
On top of that, Salzwedel also has worked extensively with SAFE BASE, USD 257’s after-school program for elementary school students, focusing his efforts on helping with the Wayne Garrett Memorial Garden, where he works in league with master gardener John Richards with various duties.
All this while entering high school without knowing much of anything about agriculture.
“My grandparents had a farm with some cows when I was little, but they’d sold it off by the time I was old enough to understand how any of that works,” he said. “But that’s the wonderful thing about FFA. You really don’t need to have any kind of extensive background knowledge about agriculture, or live on a farm or anything.”
That’s because while FFA stems from an agricultural background, it promotes other qualities, such as public speaking and career readiness.
“It’s really only part agriculture, but mostly personal growth,” Salzwedel said.
STARTING THE garden tapped into a passion Salzwedel didn’t know he had.
“It started as vegetable production, but I’m really big into foraging and wild plants,” he said. “I’m really going for native perennial shrubs that produce an edible product.”
A favorite are his juneberries, also known as Saskatoon or service berries.
“Those I started a couple of years ago in mineral tubs, and they got pretty big,” Salzwedel recalled. “They were probably too big when I planted them, but they survived.”
