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Kyla Poland, a Yelm High School senior and president of the YHS FFA chapter, is taking her talents to Indianapolis, Indiana, for the National FFA Convention Oct. 23 through Oct. 26.
The state champion in the prepared public speaking competition at May’s state convention in Pullman will compete against 49 other students — one from each state — on the first day of the event.
“It means a lot, especially because most people, when they finally get to win state, they’re a senior and they had been doing it all these years. But for me, not only was I a junior, but it was my second year doing it,” Poland said of her speech in Pullman. “I really worked hard and sacrificed a lot for this one thing, and I wasn’t expecting to win. I was proud of what I’d done, but I wasn’t expecting to win.”
Her speech is about conventional methods of farming, including the use of pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), versus organic farming methods and the trade-offs of both. Her argument is that the use of pesticides and GMOs is beneficial. She took her state championship-winning speech and tweaked it using feedback from judges. Her speech is required to be between six and eight minutes.
“I improved the content to be at the national level instead of just the state level, and I added some new pieces that I hadn’t thought about before to make it stronger,” Poland said.
Points are docked for every second under six minutes or for every second over eight minutes. Judges will also deduct points for every word that is changed as they read the printed speech as the speaker presents it. Once Poland memorized her speech again following some time off during the summer, she watched speeches from national finalists from the last few years.
“I wanted to see what the best looks like. I worked on my facial expressions and the tone of my voice, and I also worked on hand motions,” she said. “The number one most important thing is the manuscript. Number two is the speech, but number three, which is 300 out of your 1,000 points, is your questions. The judges have five minutes to question you about anything that they want within your speech, so I’ve spent a lot of hours just digging into wormholes of information in my speech to prepare and to be ready for that.”
The topic of farming methods isn’t just one Poland chose to give her the best chance of winning. It’s a topic that affects her community and is one she is passionate about, and she wants to represent Washington state and Yelm on the national stage to explain why it is an important issue.
“I’m not just there to give a speech and be good at something and win. Winning is important and would be fun, but, ultimately, my goal is to talk about a subject that I’m passionate about and to talk about something that is close to my heart,” Poland said. “For my community and for our state, it’s kind of a hot topic right now. I want to be an advocate for farmers in my state.”
Poland has looked at both sides of the spectrum, as she has family in both eastern and western Washington. She described the eastern side of the state as one where the farming community is prevalent, but the western side has plenty of people who have separated from the farming community and rely on the organic market.
“A lot of people just don’t have an understanding of organic versus pesticides and GMOs, and they don’t know that GMOs are actually really beneficial and perfectly safe and that pesticides have tons of regulations that also make them safe,” Poland said. “A lot of people just assume that organic is better, which is just wrong, and it makes me sad to see because the price of groceries has been increasing so much. People feel a need to spend even more to get organic because they feel like it’s the only safe thing, and that’s really sad because it’s not the only safe thing and there are better alternatives.”
Poland is also a member of the Yelm FFA veterinary sciences team and has raised goats through FFA. For now, her goal after high school is to work in veterinary science, specifically livestock medicine. She said that public speaking successfully on big stages, like the National FFA Convention in Indianapolis, will help her in whichever professional avenue she chooses.
“Public speaking is really important. It can help you in any career. Even if I’m not on a stage giving a speech, I’m just more confident in interactions in real life and finding the words to say in conversations,” Poland said. “Being a veterinarian, especially livestock where bad things happen sometimes, you’ve got to know how to be calm and interact with people while a scary situation might be going on. That will help me a lot in being a vet that people can trust.”
