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What is the FFA?

Good Lord I despised my time in FFA- mind you it might have something to do with my teamates.
Within FFA (Future Farmers of America) you have the option of doing Career Development Events (CDEs), these can range from horse/cattle judging, botany, flower arrangment, parlimentary procedure, to engines, and wildlife, etc. It's up to your individual FFA what events you do but my chapter did two Ag days for 5th graders and middle schoolers.
You are required to take one ag based class a school year to be in good standing- in my area you may switch school districts if you intend on doing FFA.
I did Equine Evaluation and Selection (Horse Judging) CDE. Easy as anything. We have regionals (several counties), states and then nationals. I was top for my county and region several times, then my team won states (I came in 3rd individual to a teamate and the county 4H president) and then we went to nationals (totally bombed that as a team.)
For Equine CDE you have to judge 4 in-hand classes and 4 performance classes, sometimes they arebreed specific but almost always they are gender specific (at states two years ago they tried to sneak a stallion into a mare class, some people actually missed it) Then you give oral reasons why you placed your classes the way you did. You have a test and skills. At state level it is indivual knowledge and tack ID assesment and a group skills test (horse care related). And at nationals you have to create a solution to a scinerio (ours was outlawing the transportation of horses for slaughter) and as a group present it to a judge. As a team you have a knowledge assesment (random: identify breeds, types of saddles, bones, muscular structure, feed ID.)
It CAN be a lot of work, but it just depends on how much effort you put into it (I had several other things going on so I didn't put too much time into it...)