Team Soybean

I’m halfway through my internship at Precision Soya in Farmer City, IL and it has been a wild ride so far! At the end of May, twelve Corn and Soybean Field Service Interns began internships during planting, one of the craziest times of the crop season. Being involved in the whirlwind of activity made our days fast-paced and full of new experiences. As a soybean field service intern, I have been preparing paperwork and locating fields with Precision Soya beans in them. These fields will be my responsibility when inspection time comes around! I’ve also spent a lot of time contacting growers and getting to know them through the company.

This summer has been flying by. It has been a challenge starting my internship with zero to little prior experience in the field, but my supervisor has been very supportive and assures me that it goes in my favor that I don’t have any bad habits to break. From the beginning, interns at Precision Soya have been welcomed warmly. The first few weeks began with tours of the plant and warehouse and explanations on the processes that occur within a year. Right away we started going out to fields and inspecting for replant, chemical burn, or in some cases, hail damage. This included a lot of travel time and driving, but it gave me a good idea of the area and where I would be travelling this summer. Between the office, lab, warehouse, and soybean field, I haven’t spent a lot of time in just one place this summer. In the office, the interns have been working on compiling grower information to keep and use repeatedly in the future. In the lab, I have organized and taken inventory on different samples of varieties grown. I also picked up a few things working in the warehouse, like the kind of detailed paperwork necessary to keep track of millions of beans coming into and leaving the plant.

This week, soybean interns are finishing up collecting information from the numerous growers we are responsible for and collaborating all the information into a master system so that the same information can be used every year. We are asking for information on anything and everything, from the sizes and locations of their fields to the names of their farmhands and wives.  Knowing more about the grower and his lifestyle makes it easier to communicate and relate with them. When we finish up the week we will have started flowering inspections too!

I’m really looking forward to the rest of this summer and what is left of this internship. Flowering and mapping inspections will be a new and exciting thing to start and I expect to learn quite a bit from my numerous soybean fields!