Farmers Digital Solutions 1-866-668-5565 • www.todaypublicationsfd.net September 2025 Harvest Blast Edition 18 Each year we present two Innovation Awards—one to an FFA member and one to a 4-H member—along with a plaque and a check. The goal is simple: encourage ingenuity, reward follow-through, and help bring more inventive projects to the fairgrounds. Those motivations are personal. Our sons were deeply involved in 4-H and FFA, and the State Fair gave them a firm deadline and a public stage. Chasing that yearly goal led us down a path of our own—building a seed tender that eventually became Mixmate and, ultimately, Praxidyn. That’s why this program matters to us. This year marked our 15th award to an FFA member and our fourth to a 4-H member, and the talent coming up behind us is inspiring. Our FFA Innovation Award went to Colton Netolicky, who designed and built an electric race car and campaigned it at multiple competitions. Colton squeezed impressive efficiency out of his machine, set track records, and—maybe most importantly—stacked up real skills along the way. He welded, formed sheet metal, wired systems, and solved the thousand little problems that appear whenever a big idea meets the real world. That combination of craftsmanship and systems thinking is exactly what agriculture and industry need. Our 4-H Innovation Award went to Pacey Bogue for a working tornado siren he engineered from the ground up. Pacey modeled his design in Fusion 360, 3D-printed the components, and iterated relentlessly. There were setbacks (as every maker knows), but persistence won out. The final siren sounds fantastic—stick around to the end of his interview and you can hear it sing. More than the sound, though, it’s the process that stands out: design, test, learn, improve, repeat. I had the privilege of interviewing both young men, and they handled themselves with the same poise they brought to their projects.
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