While attending the National FFA Convention in Indianapolis, Indiana, Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays caught up with one of the four Oklahoma Star finalists, Larahmy Blakley, from the Oologah FFA Chapter. He specializes in Agricultural Production.
The American Star Farmer is awarded to the FFA member that demonstrates the top production agriculture supervised agricultural experience in the nation. The member must demonstrate outstanding achievement, active FFA participation, and an exemplary scholastic record.
In eighth grade, Blakley’s project began with beef and swine production projects comprised of 50 head of mama cows and two sows. Currently, his project has grown to 250 cows and 12 sows. Within his beef project, he has about 100 mama cows owned by other producers who pay him on a cost-of-production basis. He also feeds 250 head of stocker cattle for other producers through winters on the same basis of pay.
His swine operation is focused on show-quality pigs and the ones that don’t make the cut are used in his meat market SAE, which consists of retail cuts of beef and pork sold at farmers’ markets in the Tulsa area.
“When I first started, I also grew vegetables,” Blakely said. “Which I sold at farmers’ markets as well. In addition to the livestock and meat production side of my SAE project, I also have a forage side which consists of baling hay for myself and custom baling for others. I also do some sharecropping, where I split a percentage of the hay with the landowner.”
Blakely said that his two favorite parts of his project are livestock production and the forage SAE. “I’m big on production agriculture,” he said. “I grew up on a large-scale cow calf operation where we baled a lot of hay, and when I was younger, my dad did a lot of row crop farming of corn, soybeans, and wheat.”
To become more efficient in his cattle herd, Blakely has moved his record keeping from paper to a custom Excel sheet he created to track records of cost and gain. He also records his cows’ performance records using CattlePro.
He understands how important record-keeping is to an operation. He said, “It is so vital because when you have twenty head of cows, you know what they have done, but with 250 head of mama cows, I can check the performance of any one of them within seconds using the app on my phone. It helps keep me organized.”
Blakley is on a collegiate livestock judging team at the University of Arkansas, and when he graduates in two years, he plans to return home to continue to build on the operations he has started. “We’ve been five generations deep in the state of Oklahoma. My great-great-great-grandfather staked a claim in the Oklahoma land run in 1879 down near Skeleton Creek in present-day Waukomis, Oklahoma, and we are now three generations deep in Northwest Oklahoma in Rogers County. I want to continue to grow that legacy.”
As far as what FFA has done for him, Blakely said, “It has given me lasting leadership abilities and helped develop me as a person, but the biggest thing that I hope to take away from my FFA career is the relationships built. I don’t know how many people I have met in a blue and gold jacket. Thirty years from now, nobody cares who won what, but it’s the relationships you build with not only the people from across the state but also from across the nation.”
Click here to see the website for the National FFA Convention for 2024 in Indianapolis.
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