Former House speaker Jeff Hickman touched on a variety of subjects Thursday when he served as guest speaker of the Kingfisher Lions Club.

A fifth-generation farmer who grew up in Dacoma and Cherokee, Hickman recently took over as the president and CEO of the Oklahoma Grain and Feed Association.

The association has been in existence since 1898 and is headquartered in Enid.

“This is such a great part of the state and that’s why I’m excited about my new role,” said Hickman, who now lives in Fairview.

Hickman was elected to the state House in 2004 and represented Alfalfa, Major, Woods and Woodward counties. He was speaker of the House for the last three sessions before term limits ended his stay at the Capitol in 2016.

He was most recently the chief communications and facilities officer for Great Salt Plains Health Center before succeeding longtime president and CEO Joe Neal Hampton with the OGFA.

“We do a lot of training and education,” Hickman said, noting the OGFA has done a good job of adapting “as agriculture gets more challenging.”

One adaptation has been joining forces.

The Oklahoma Agribusiness Retailers Association, Oklahoma Seed Trade Association and the Oklahoma Wheat Growers Association are all now managed by the OGFA.

“When we all come together, it gives us strength,” Hickman said.

Hickman also touched on this year’s harvest, which is reported at 96 percent complete in the most recent report from the Oklahoma Wheat Commission.

Outside of some late freeze damage in the southwest portion of the state and some hail in the far west, Hickman said “you couldn’t have asked for better weather” this season.

He said the OWC projected about a month before harvest that Kingfisher County would harvest about 160,000 acres of wheat, one of the biggest numbers in the state.

Test weights were consistently in the mid-to upper-60’s, which he said was “just incredible.”

“All in all, it was a pretty good year to raise wheat,” he said.

Hickman also serves on the State Regents for Higher Education, which has a list of duties including determining functions and courses of study for 25 colleges and universities in the state as well as allocating funds for those colleges.

The day before speaking with Lions, Hickman took part in a seven-hour-long virtual meeting in which the presidents from each of those colleges presented their budgets for the next fiscal year.

“That’s the first time I’ve spent that long in front of a computer screen,” Hickman said. “It was a challenge.”