FFA Life Member Lyle Orwig, of Chaska, Minnesota, recently retired after four decades as the chairman and founding partner of Charleston/Orwig, Inc., and made a $1 million gift to the National FFA Foundation. We sat down to talk with Lyle (pictured above with wife Karma) about how FFA impacted his life and career and why he chose to make such a substantial gift to the organization at this time.
Orwig began his FFA journey in 1964 when he joined the Clifton Central FFA Chapter in Clifton, Ill.
As a young man growing up on the
family farm, it was only natural that his supervised agricultural experience (SAE) focus on corn, soybeans, and wheat crops. But it was his FFA experience as a Greenhand reporter that sparked his interest in communications. His time as a Greenhand and then chapter reporter led him to become a stringer (a part-time or freelance journalist) for the local newspapers. His role as chapter reporter also allowed him to attend the chapter reporter’s workshop at the University of Illinois, where he learned about the agricultural communications curricula offered there. That workshop created a spark in Orwig and intrigued him with the presented educational and professional opportunities.
His love for FFA and that spark for ag communications continued to grow, leading to his election as the Illinois state FFA reporter. “My year as state FFA reporter in Illinois trained me to become a public speaker and helped give me confidence to stand in front of Fortune 100 companies and present sustainability, crisis communications, and marketing plans and programs to their executives, board members, and senior leadership teams,” Orwig said.
Through those opportunities and experiences as a reporter within FFA, he started his four-decade-long career in ag communications. Couple those experiences with his participation in the former FFA World Experience Abroad (WEA) program, and that propelled Orwig to make his $1 million donation to the National FFA Foundation recently.
When asked why providing international experiences to FFA members was part of the focus of his gift, Orwig stated that, “I participated in the FFA’s WEA program and spent four months on a farm in England in 1970. It gave me a worldview of agriculture and one that has helped me throughout my career. I was encouraged by my FFA advisor to get that view, and so while the WEA program no longer exists, I believe that it would be good to at least get an opportunity for other FFA advisors to participate in an international program that will benefit other FFA members over time.”
Orwig also attributes his lifelong FFA membership to where he is today. “Until my sophomore year in high school, my goal was to be a high school football coach and college referee. But my love of farming and the exposure to ag comm at the U of I changed that. FFA taught me that people matter, and working as a team-taught teamwork and collaboration as I learned ‘all of us’ is smarter than one of us.”
His advice to his fellow FFA members is, “Know what you stand for … it’s all about principles, plus, you’ll never succeed unless you try. All I’ve learned is crystalized here: https://co-nxt.com/blog/2021-predictions/.”
