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From Cornell to Channel: My Summer with Monsanto

Channel BagsMy name is Hannah Riensche and I am a rising junior concentrating in business. For a quick background on myself, I am from a conventional corn and soybean farm in northeast Iowa that my family has owned and operated for the last six generations. I am primarily interested in crop sciences and agronomy.

This summer, I am interning for Channel Bio, LLC (or just Channel for short). The Channel seed company has had an interesting past, originating in 1999 and then was subsequently sold to Monsanto in 2004. In 2009, Monsanto took three more acquired seed companies (Crow’s, Midwest Seed Genetics, and NC+) and combined them together under the Channel name. Today, Channel is one of three seed “divisions” under Monsanto, the others being National brands (Dekalb, Deltapine, & Asgrow) and regional brands like Krueger, Hubner, Lewis, etc.) For those unfamiliar with what seed companies are, Channel sells bulk corn, soybean, alfalfa, and sorghum seed for farmers across the East, Midwest, and Great Plains.

For my internship, I am living next to the PA/OH border on the Ohio side, and go back and forth every day meeting with farmers in eastern Ohio, western New York, and mostly western Pennsylvania. For me, the most rewarding aspect of this internship is having the ability to meet with farmers and hear from a first-person perspective their thoughts, goals, and concerns within their agricultural location. Under a salesman who “owns” these accounts, I go visit these farms with the pretense of learning rather than sales as an intern, which opens up the growers to discuss how they perceive the products offered by the Channel brand. Often, I will go walk fields with growers to observe the crop performance and even make agronomic recommendations.

However, this is not the only thing I do within the internship. Monsanto has a very structured program for their students, requiring that the participating individuals perform three projects over the course of the summer. The first is that students must meet and build a relationship with approx. forty different growers. Second, we must do a project constructed especially for our area by our District Sales Managers and Area Business Managers. My project is doing field scouting and reports for the top ten growers in the district. Lastly, we must complete a corporate project that is assigned to us upon arrival at our training week in St. Louis. My corporate project is contacting the seed dealer network to survey and record grain handling facilities to eventually collaborate with a new product, then compile and map the data. This will be presented at our wrap-up week in St. Louis at the end of the internship.

So far, the experience I have had with Monsanto and Channel has been unmatched to anything I have done before. Not only is the sales team I work under full of dedicated and incredible people, but the knowledge of the business I have gained and the networking I have been able to do with my passionate inter-peer class have really made this a top-notch opportunity. While moving to a new place under a new company may have been difficult at first, it has paid off in more ways imaginable.

This is me scouting soybeans in the early growing season.

This is me scouting soybeans in the early growing season. Cool weather and lots of rain left plenty of room for concerns.

My DSM (green shirt) out with a grower looking at a test plot comparing varieties of seed side-by-side.

My DSM, Steve (green shirt), out with a grower looking at a test plot comparing varieties of seed side-by-side.

Growers from all over West PA get together for dinner and a guest speaker on grain marketing advice.

Growers from all over West PA get together for dinner and a guest speaker on grain marketing advice.

This is corn affected by cold weather. Lots of farmers in the area saw this in fields planted in early May, as temperatures dropped down to 28° unexpectedly in the middle of the month.

This is corn affected by cold weather. Lots of farmers saw this in fields planted in early May, as temperatures dropped to 28°.

 

 

Week 1: Corn, Potatoes, and Beetles…Oh My!

This week marked the first of ten of my summer internship at the Long Island Horticultural Research and Extension Center in Suffolk County. This was an exciting week where I became oriented with the research station and what my summer duties would entail. After a brief introductory session on my first day, I jumped right into work on the research plots digging up potatoes, laying irrigation, placing seeds, and counting hundreds of beetles!  I also gained experience in pest scouting for strawberry and sweet corn crops on local farms. Next week I look forward to beginning work on an additional project that works to identify grower perception and availability in regards to expanding their cultivation systems to include broccoli. I had an informative and enjoyable first week and am eager to see what the rest of the summer has in store for me.

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