At its 2024 chapter banquet, the Ashby FFA recognized Lakeside Lumber with its Outstanding Business Support Award — and we couldn’t be more honored.
What the Award Recognized
FFA chapter banquets recognize the people, families, and businesses that make a chapter possible throughout the year. The chapter cited Lakeside’s contributions across several areas:
- Materials for chapter projects, including the dugout sheet-metal replacement at the Ashby baseball field
- Placement sites for students gaining real-world work experience in the building materials industry
- Advisory committee involvement to help shape the chapter’s curriculum and programming
- Advocacy for the FFA program in the Ashby community
Why FFA Matters to Us
The Ashby Public School FFA chapter is part of the National FFA Organization — formerly known as Future Farmers of America — which has been preparing students for leadership and careers in agriculture, food, and natural resources since 1928. In a community like Ashby, where ag and skilled trades are central to how families make a living, that pipeline is everything.
Our team includes folks who came up through programs exactly like this one. Supporting Ashby FFA isn’t really sponsorship in the marketing sense — it’s just paying back into the system that built the workforce we depend on every day.
Thank you to the Ashby Ag Department, the chapter advisors, and the students for the recognition. We’re proud to be part of it.
The Ashby FFA cited Lakeside Lumber for providing “multiple layers of support from materials, placement sites, advisory committees, and advocacy.” (Source: Ashby Ag & FFA Facebook page, March 27, 2024)
The April/May 2026 issue of BLD Connection Magazine features a story about Lakeside Lumber — and the kind of thing that happens when family-owned yards in our industry actually know each other.
What Happened
Back in mid-February, a driver from Siwek Lumber & Millwork in Jordan, Minnesota was about three and a half hours into a delivery run to North Dakota. A blizzard had blown through the day before, the roads were still rough, and his trailer ended up damaged in an accident — beyond use. The load was heavy: doors and pallets of stair treads. The delivery still had to get to North Dakota.
Jason Pranghofer, the fourth-generation owner of Siwek, headed out with a replacement trailer. But without a forklift on site, transferring those pallets by hand would have taken close to three hours.
So Jason called Mike Rossum here at Lakeside. Mike and Jason had connected through a BLD Roundtable — one of the small peer groups the association puts together so independent dealers can compare notes a few times a year.
Mike sent his son Levi — one of our drivers — out with one of our trucks with a Piggyback forklift mounted on the back. A Piggyback is a forklift that rides on the rear of the truck: you unhook it at the site, use it to move material, then hook it back on for the trip home. Most yards don’t have them. We do, on our straight truck and our semi, because half of what we deliver gets dropped at sites without a forklift waiting. Levi got the pallets shifted to the new trailer and Siwek’s delivery back on the road north.
Why It Mattered
In the article, Pranghofer told BLD Connection that what started as a networking introduction “became a real partnership when it mattered most.”
That’s the part we’d want to underline too. Independent lumber yards could see each other as competitors — and in some markets that’s how it works. But the BLD Roundtables we’re part of have always operated differently. You sit around a table with other family-owned yards a few times a year, you talk about what’s working and what isn’t, and you build relationships with people who actually understand the business.
When something goes sideways at 7 a.m. on a county road, those relationships are what get the load delivered.
We’re proud to be part of BLD Connection, and grateful to Jason and the Siwek crew for the kind words.
Read the Full Article
The full story appears on page 24 of the April/May 2026 issue of BLD Connection Magazine:
“When a Roundtable Relationship Delivers”
BLD Connection Magazine · April/May 2026 · Read on Issuu →
Originally published in BLD Connection Magazine, April/May 2026.