FFA Foundations & SAE
This 3-letter acronym stands for your individual, hands-on agriculture project outside of normal class time.
What is an SAE (Supervised Agricultural Experience)?
This is the term for a potential customer who might need your agricultural product but hasn't bought it yet.
What is a Prospect (or Lead)?
According to the laws of economics, when the supply of Missouri soybeans goes way up but consumer demand stays low, this happens to the market price.
What is it decreases (the price drops)?
In basic terms, profit is calculated by taking your total revenue and subtracting these business necessities.
What are Expenses (or Costs)?
This is the simplest and most common type of farm business structure, where one single individual owns, manages, and takes all the risks of the operation.
What is a Sole Proprietorship?
This is the specific 4-word FFA motto that reminds us to "do to learn" and "earn to live."
What is "Learning to Do, Doing to Learn, Earning to Live, Living to Serve"?
When a customer says, "This seed corn is just too expensive," they are throwing this common sales hurdle at you.
What is an Objection?
This is the term for the value of the next best alternative you give up when making a business choice— like choosing to plant corn instead of wheat.
What is Opportunity Cost?
On a farm balance sheet, this 5-letter term describes anything of value that the farm owns, such as tractors, land, or grain in storage.
What is an Asset?
This 3-letter business structure acronym stands for a hybrid legal setup that protects an owner's personal assets from business debts without facing corporate double-taxation.
What is an LLC (Limited Liability Company)?
If you operate, own, and take financial risks for your own lawn care, livestock, or crop business, your SAE falls under this specific category.
What is Entrepreneurship (or Ownership)?
In ag sales, a product's feature is what the product is, while this is what the product actually does for the buyer (like saving them money or time).
What is a Benefit?
These are expenses that change directly with your level of production, like the cost of fuel, livestock feed, or fertilizer.
What is a Variable Cost?
This financial document maps out the inflows and outflows of money over a period of time to ensure a farm has enough cash on hand to pay its bills month-to-month.
What is a Cash Flow Statement (or Cash Flow Budget)?
Farmers routinely use this risk-management tool to protect their finances from unpredictable Missouri weather, pests, or natural disasters.
What is Crop Insurance (or general Insurance)?
This Missouri city is legendary in FFA history for hosting the very first National FFA Convention back in 1928.
What is Kansas City?
This is the critical final step of the direct sales process where you actually ask the customer for the order and secure the deal.
What is Closing the sale?
No matter how many cattle you run, expenses like land property taxes, machinery depreciation, and building insurance do not change, making them this type of cost.
What is a Fixed Cost?
If you take your farm assets and subtract your liabilities (what you owe), you are left with this, which represents your true equity or ownership value.
What is Net Worth (or Owner's Equity)?
This is a legally binding agreement between two parties—such as a landowner and a tenant farmer—outlining the rules for leasing pasture or crop acreage.
What is a Lease (or Contract)?
Of the four degrees a high school FFA member can earn, this is the highest degree that can be awarded at the state level.
What is the State FFA Degree?
This 2-word sales strategy involves suggesting a complementary item to a buyer, such as offering a calf-bottle holder right after they buy a replacement milk replacer.
What is suggestion selling (or Cross-selling)?
This economic principle states that as you add more of a variable input (like adding more and more fertilizer to a crop), you will eventually reach a point where the extra yield you get starts to shrink.
What is the Law of Diminishing Returns?
This accounting term describes a business's ability to meet its long-term financial obligations if it were forced to sell all assets—showing whether total assets are greater than total liabilities.
What is Solvency?
This type of legal business structure is owned and operated by its members, who pool their resources together to get better prices on inputs like fertilizer or to market their grain in bulk.
What is a Cooperative (or Co-op)?