Amid plenty of local fanfare, the Petaluma Future Farmers of America team will be heading to Edinburgh, Scotland next week to participate in the 170th Royal Highland Show.
Team members Mandy Brazil, Kelli Carstensen, Sam Cheda and Rocco Cunningham - accompanied by coach Dominic Grossi, as well as family members and friends -?will be competing in the dairy-cattle evaluation category in the event, which will take place June 24-27.
"The school community has always been supportive, and they are also really excited for these kids, and really proud of them, which they should be," Grossi said. "(Our team members) are very excited, and I don't think that they are nervous, because they have been doing this for four years."
"I don't know how different the competition in Scotland will be from the other ones, but we will be competing against teams from all over the world," Brazil said.
Some 175,000 people from more than 20 countries are expected to attend the event, which is run by the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland. The society was established in 1784 to promote the regeneration of rural Scotland.
The Petaluma group qualified for the international event by finishing second in dairy-cattle evaluation among 43 teams in the FFA national competition in Indianapolis, Ind., in October. Five Petaluma teams have competed in national events, but this is the first team to reach the international stage.
Cunningham was a senior at Petaluma High School this year, while the other three students graduated in 2009, and then began attending Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.
"We haven't done much to prepare as a team, because three out of the four students were at Cal Poly, but they have been practicing with their collegiate FFA coach there," Grossi said.
Brazil lauds the coaching that Grossi has given the team.
"He has always been really supportive of us, and he's always had a positive attitude," she said. "He has been helping us since we were freshmen, and we used to go out to his dairy to gain experience."
The team members, who all grew up in farms around Petaluma, need to pay their way to Scotland, so they organized a fund-raising event that included a pasta feed and silent auction.
"We had a very large turnout, and made nearly enough to pay for each student. We always have had extraordinary support from the community," Grossi said.
"The pasta feed really helped to get us &‘pumped,'" Brazil added.
None of the students has been to Europe before, and after the competition, they will spend two weeks sightseeing there and in other European countries.
"We are excited about touring the countryside of Germany, England and France, and because none of us have been outside of this country before, it will be interesting to see how their industries work," Brazil said.
(Contact Dan Johnson at dan.johnson@arguscourier.com. Intern Caitlin Griffin conducted the interviews for this article.)
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