Thad Bergschneider Reflects on His Year as FFA President

Thaddeus “Thad” Bergschneider doesn’t tell tidy leadership stories. He tells real ones, the kind with lanyard slings, botched Spanish, and a steak someone else cut for him at a business dinner. His 2024-25 year as National FFA president was full of the spotlight moments most people expect; it was also full of the very human ones that make the highlight reel matter.

“I still can’t believe it’s already here,” the Illinois native said as the 98th National FFA Convention & Expo approaches Oct. 29 to Nov. 1. 

If you want the thesis of his year in one line, it’s this: Leadership amplifies who you already are. As he put it, “You have a superpower. If you say ‘Congratulations,’ people may think back to when the National FFA president said that to them. The good things you do are amplified, and so are the bad. That is the nature of leadership.”

A week in American Falls: “I’ll never forget that moment.”

When Bergschneider was asked for one story that captures the soul of his year, he didn’t hesitate.

“I hope this story is not overused at this point, but it is one of the most impactful moments of my year,” he said. “I got to spend a week in American Falls, Idaho, which is really unique to a national officer schedule. You might spend four days at a convention, maybe five if you’re lucky, but spending a week anywhere — especially with a chapter in one region — that doesn’t happen.”

And because it did happen, something else followed … depth.

“Being [somewhere for] two days, you get to the level where you love these people, you say, ‘These are my best friends. These are my family,’ ” he said. “But a week and getting to build those relationships and truly dive deeper. … I left, and those are still people that I text.”

The culminating scene came at a Saturday banquet in Idaho.

“Community members flooded in. Their community is roughly 50 percent Hispanic, [50 percent] White,” he explained. “There’s a lot of ag industry … potatoes, sugar beets, a lot of specialty crop. And there’s also a lot of ag companies like Lamb Weston, who are making the potatoes and the French fries for McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A.”

Bergschneider stepped up to offer brief remarks, and decided to try something courageous: Offer a portion of his speech in a language he is not fluent in.

“I got up at the banquet and I spoke for maybe three minutes,” he said. “I just told a quick story, and then I tried to, from memory, speak a quick message in Spanish. I took four years of Spanish in high school … but my Spanish is not good.”

He had help from his sister and some chapter members to write and practice the paragraph. “I went up there and I completely biffed it,” he said, laughing at himself. “I get four sentences in. I had my phone with me, so I take out my notes app, and I read the rest of it.”

He didn’t tell the story to brag about the attempt, but because of what happened around it. “I’ll never forget that moment … being a part of a community that felt so deeply for their FFA chapter.”

He credits the chapter’s longtime leader. “This is a chapter that started 25 years ago with [ag teacher] Mark Badia” — and the many, many students whose growth is changing the arc of their families. “You could chalk it up to premier leadership, personal growth, and career success, but I mean, they’re changing lives,” Bergschneider said.

He paused and said, simply, “There has not been a more powerful moment this year than spending that much time in a community and getting to watch the community support the FFA chapter.”

A broken arm that provided a ‘fast pass to vulnerability’

Late March came with a different kind of lesson. “On March 29, I broke my radius bone trying to dunk a basketball by our apartments,” he admitted. “Yeah, stupid young male behavior. That’s why our insurance costs so much.”

What followed wasn’t just pain management and logistics; it was perspective. Bergschneider found himself in the E.R., and a day later , a cast, eventually heading in for surgery, and three to four months of consequences of shooting one bad hoop. 

He rattled off the inconveniences, each one both funny and telling. “At the Massachusetts State Convention, I had left my sling back in the apartment, and I was supposed to keep it elevated. So I stuffed my arm in a lanyard so it’s propped up above my shoulder, and I’m walking around like a week after my injury with my arm in a lanyard, talking to FFA members.”

A few days after surgery, he was back at it. “I want to say four or five days post-op, I’m at the Missouri FFA State Convention. I was initially on opioids. I call my doctor, and I tell them I’m giving a speech, ask if it’s OK that I stay on them. They say, ‘Get off right now.’ So I’m dealing with the pain coming off of that, trying to give a speech,” he said.

Bergschneider shook his head and smiled. “Crazy enough, that was my favorite convention of the year.”

Even dinner was humbling. “I couldn’t tie my shoes or cut my steak. I was on an industry visit, and this 50-year-old vet who works for Elanco saw me struggling, and he reached over and he cut my steak for me like I was a little child. I was going, ‘This is so embarrassing.’ ”

But, Bergschneider said, here’s the heart of the story: “All that to say, there are these awful moments, these inconveniences, and I got to connect with people in a completely different way.” The cast was an instant conversation starter. “When my arm was broken … they asked, ‘How’d you do it?’ I told them this embarrassing story, this vulnerable story about myself, and then they said, ‘Oh yeah, here’s this time that I struggled …’ For three months I got like an immediate — I don’t know what you call that — Disney FastPass to vulnerability, into the deepest conversations I’ve ever had.”

Discipline took on new meaning, too. Despite a rigorous travel schedule, Bergschneider couldn’t miss physical therapy. 

“I would have called myself a decently disciplined person … but my PT also served me some humble pie. How good are you at actually carving out the time that you need to take care of yourself?” he reminisced. “And the answer at first was not very good. I had to learn that.”

Staying humble under the weight of the blue jacket 

Bergschneider said that one question from a Kansas student redirected the year. Bergschneider opened it up for Q&A, and a girl asked him, “Hey, how do you stay humble?” It wasn’t the usual “Where have you traveled?” question. It cut deeper.

“The more I thought about it, the more I realized that what has kept me humble this year … is realizing that this role — the national [president] — when people enjoy something that I say, when they say something has been impactful, it may have been a small piece of me, right? But usually, usually most of it is the fact that it’s the National FFA president who says that.”

And then he said the line he’s carried with him everywhere.

“You have to accept that you, for a year, have a superpower … and you use that to the best of your ability,” he said. “You steward it, you encourage other people, you serve, but you have to accept the fact that it’s the role, not you. …

“I mean this literally,” he added. “When I walk out of this role, people are not going to recognize me anymore when I walk in a grocery store. … There’s going to be a few people who recognize me because I made personal connections with them, but a majority of people aren’t going to see the jacket, and that’s going to be all gone.”

Humility, then, is about holding the attention lightly, and spending it on others. “Use this position to spotlight others,” he said. “Think of yourself less; stay humble.”

What is FFA? Ask a better question

Somewhere along the miles, his “What is FFA?” answer changed, too. “We all have that elevator pitch,” he said. “You’re trained on an elevator pitch as a chapter officer, as a state officer, as a national officer.” But this year, halfway through, “I walked into an elevator at a random hotel … and somebody asked me, ‘What is FFA?’ And I just asked a question back: ‘How would you want your kid to be educated?’ ”

That conversation almost always travels to the same place: “Usually people get to the same points around wanting their kid to be confident communicating, speaking, working in teams, having hands-on experience, going through failure and hardship and overcoming it.”

Once they say it out loud, he connects the dots. “If you have the time to actually have that conversation … I can usually go, ‘For the most part, that’s FFA,’ ” he said.

He’s blunt about what he’s seen across the country throughout his year as president. “FFA is the best system … for creating people who are — this is too loose of a term, but — good. It creates good people,” Bergschneider explained. “It creates people who look you in the eye, who shake your hand, who care about their home, who care about their community, who care about the impact they have on other people, who know what it is to do something right and to have integrity through the whole process. More than anything, that’s what I saw this year.”

Leading an organization with more than 1 million members is a privilege, and a puzzle.

“There have been national decisions this year, like affiliation, that I’ve been a part of,” he said, referring to strategic conversations that affect chapters and students everywhere. “Serving on the [National FFA] Board of Directors for me has been an absolute joy. I love the people that I work with. [Board Chairman] Dr. [Travis] Park is incredible. His advice and his mentorship have changed my year as a national officer.”

But you don’t get a million people together without friction. He explains part of what he’s learned this year is that when you have a million members, you have problems because you have an incredibly diverse group of perspectives. But, the only way through is together.

“You have to be willing to have hard conversations where everyone comes to the table, trusts each other, engages in that trust and that constructive conflict, and then commits to the best solution moving forward,” Bergschneider noted. “Any team that I’ve been on in the past that is not incredibly successful does not have that level of trust to engage in constructive conflict. One of the highlights of my year has been serving with a national officer team and a National FFA Board of Directors that is willing to act it out.”

Turning ‘red’ into restraint, and learning to write before speaking

Bergschneider said that he knows his wiring.

“After doing a couple personality tests, my leadership style is ‘red’ … I’m fiery, I’m direct, I try to initiate that constructive conflict, and I really want to find the action steps that we’re going to take to move forward,” he explained.

On his team, he says he was the only true red. That bias for action is a gift — and a gap.

“What I had to learn this year is listening in a more intentional way,” he said. “If you would have asked me if I was a good listener before this year, I probably would have said, ‘Yeah.’ What I found out this year is that I have to be intentional about entering a conversation and say, I’m going to be the last one to speak.”

He made it practical. “There’s been a couple times this year when I have, like, written down in my journal: this person talked, this person talked, this person talked … now I can speak and give my input.”

And he reached back to history for a pattern to copy.

“George Washington … had a temper. He was really a fiery individual — you would identify him as a red,” he said. “One of the lessons I had to take this year was that what defined George Washington wasn’t his redness … it was his ability to temper that. He became the founding father who was the silent, stoic man who rarely had an opinion, but listened and weighed in at the end.”

A word to FFA members

If there’s one thing Bergschneider wants the next generation of FFA to remember, it’s that every person in that blue jacket already has a superpower. Every word of encouragement, every act of kindness, every brave conversation echoes farther than you realize. “Encourage others while you have the chance,” he said. “Use your superpower.”

Because when the jacket comes off and the title fades, the lesson remains: Leadership doesn’t transform you into someone new — it simply amplifies who you already are, he explained. So become the kind of person worth amplifying, and when your voice carries, make sure it’s lifting someone else’s.

“FFA creates good people,” Bergschneider said earlier in the year. People who look you in the eye, who do what’s right, who care about the world around them.

That, more than anything, is what he hopes the next generation remembers: that the blue jacket doesn’t make you special, you make it meaningful.

Heidi Crnkovic, is the Associate Editor for AGDAILY. She is a New Mexico native with deep-seated roots in the Southwest and a passion for all things agriculture.