Hello! The first two weeks of my internship have been amazing. I’ve already learned and worked on several new things. While I’m still getting settled, I’ve had opportunities to both observe and assist in meaningful ways.
This week, the pace picked up with more fieldwork compared to the rainy week we had for the start of our internship. Thanks to past experiences involving trials, plots, and flagging, I was able to jump in quickly and start helping with the setup and layout for multiple experiments. I measured soybean heights and worked on identifying corn plots with damage. We also took biomass samples of a cover crop for one of Kurt’s studies.
One of the most unexpected parts of this week was learning how pesticide application actually works. I had assumed it was all done by a tractor pulling a large tank, but for small research plots, the process is much more manual and detailed. We made the pesticide mixtures ourselves using specific measurement protocols, and I learned that the tools used rely on air pressure.
Pesticide application is actually one of the most
challenging things I’ve learned so far. You have to mix the chemicals in a
specific order and calibrate the boom sprayer properly. You also need to ensure
the CO₂ tank has enough pressure and that the weather conditions are safe. On
top of that, there’s PPE to wear, safety distances to maintain, and
post-spraying cleanup, for example; rinsing everything thoroughly three times.
There are so many steps, and it really emphasized how careful and precise you
need to be when working with pesticides. It was overwhelming at first, but also
really interesting to see how much goes into doing it right.
One of my major goals for this internship is to apply my
background in data science to agriculture, and I’ve already started doing that.
Kurt gave me cover crop data from 2021 and 2022, and I ran some basic analyses
to see which termination method was most effective at reducing weed growth. It
was nice to connect fieldwork with data interpretation. Nicole also shared
archived data from corn and soybean trials going back to the 1970s. I’m excited
to explore those datasets further and hopefully apply more advanced techniques
as the internship progresses.
I hope to continue learning more about field
equipment, especially the differences between various tractors and the
attachments they tow. I’m interested in how GPS tracking and self-steering
systems are used in planting. That kind of precision technology fascinates me, because
I don’t know how it works.
Overall, it’s been a great start. I’ve already learned so
much, both in the field and behind the computer screen. I’m excited to keep
building on that in the weeks ahead.
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