The key to a good internship is asking all the right questions to gain better opportunities.
My day to day life consists of what others may see as mundane meaningless intern-only work. However, I found this a good opportunity to learn about logistics within a Research Farm. As interns our day to day tasks changed throughout the summer. In the beginning, we did a lot of preparation for planting, such tasks included: checking inventory, processing grain, packaging seed for the field, sorting packets for different planting locations, preparing equipment for fieldwork, and actually putting the seed in the ground.
Of these jobs, I feel the most stressful was packaging the seed and sending it to the proper location. Boxes were triple checked and put in proper order so that it would be an easy transition for those working on top of the planter. Even as I was in the field with my fellow interns there was a box or two that was assembled incorrectly nearly disrupting the whole order of the planting map.
A big point of logistics with planting was communication between seed droppers and the operator (as seen in photo) while driving one has to be aware that all systems were in the proper trip settling, that the planter was lowered and raised at a safe speed, and correct the auto-steer as needed. Before I had the opportunity to drive the planter, I was a seed dropper/ distributor on top of the planter. I will address when the operator doesn't communicate with distributors, things can get a little crazy and you feel as though you are riding a rollercoaster.
After planting one of the top priories for stewardship at BASF was volunteer crop monitoring. This required the team to go out to the plots of the previous year and check for volunteer DUP (Regulated Crops) and destroy in the untested plot. Destroying the volunteer beans ensured that DUP seed would not contaminate the grain stream. When the corn was taller (than shown below) it was very easy for the interns to get lost in the field. If one was not careful about counting steps of staying within stride with the team, you could easily walk a quarter of a mile in the wrong directions. After a few instances where an intern continually got lost in the field, my boss found it was high time that the team bought walkie talkies to communicate. This proved to be a very effective mode of communication and the team never leaves for the field without them. This job was to be repeated each month throughout the from planting till just before harvest, and it was a time-consuming task that would take a week to yet all the past planting locations. My boss did the best he could with the number of workers he had if we would have had 3 more interns things would have gone faster.
The skill that I was most excited to learn was cross-pollinating. This job was not for the impatient or quick to anger that's for sure. Using tiny tweezers to peel open even smaller flower buds was not a simple task for me. What I like to call "sterilizing the plant" or ripping every flower bud off a single plant was not uncommon in the beginning. However, eventually, I was able to get my barrings and become one of the faster pollinators then I was called to teach the other interns who were not in attendance during the training day. I used my teaching training from previous classes in school too as questions as I demonstrated to my fellow intern, I practiced asking questions of their level of competency throughout the task, gave them assistance while pollinating, and tested their abilities by having them finish flowers on their own. I found this portion of the job was very rewarding this summer because I never had the privilege to teach a skill that could help someone later down the line in crop science work.
In summary for the logistics for a research farm the keys to success are:
the organization, communication, and willingness to step up and teach. I think without the great supervisor Nathan that I have this operation would end in shambles.
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