Growing a Future
11/30/2009 12:00 AM

Cooperative internships benefit growers and students

(The following article appears in the Fall 2009 issue of growingtogether magazine. To view the entire publication, click here.)

By the time summer interns at your local cooperative start heading back to school in the fall, they can provide an agronomist with complete field histories and a crop production analysis to help farmers make good, profitable buying decisions. They’ve also reaped the knowledge and relationships to nearly guarantee themselves a job after graduation. Al Macius, the sales manager at Central Valley Cooperative in Owatonna, Minn., knows this. For more than a decade, he has hired about nine interns each summer with the help of college recruiting specialists from Land O’Lakes Business Development Services Ag Business Placement.

He says the students selected and trained by the Land O’Lakes internship program are confident and able to hit the ground running. After two or three summers at CVC, nearly all of them have been moved into full-time positions after graduation. “Our interns scout fields for weeds, insects, disease and nutrient deficiencies,” Macius says. “They perform tissue tests, create ‘root boards,’ perform standard deviations, put together crop assessment sheets and perform preliminary data collection on crop development. They even put in plots and place a few seed signs.”

The hours spent in the fields not only provide hands-on knowledge to the students, but create efficiencies in the sales process for CVC, Macius says.

“The interns are enabling us to help our growers understand their businesses better and that leads to better relationships … and it also helps develop the agronomists of the future,” Macius says. “For the interns that are running our tissue testing program and are in the field, explaining the results can be very effective as a contact with the grower when it comes to positioning Max-In® products. In this instance, the producers are very comfortable talking about products with the intern because they all appreciate the effort the interns put in when scouting their farms.”

Will CVC continue to utilize Land O’Lakes Business Development Services Ag Business Placement internship program for years to come?

Macius says yes, internships are helping develop successful young people and they are critical to the success of his business. “Knowing that my staff and I had a part in it gives me immense satisfaction,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned, the cooperative system should look at [the internship program] as a responsibility.”