Some Interesting Connections!
December 27th, 2018
Hi everybody my name is Hannah! I am a sophomore, soon-to-be Junior (by the time I finish this blog), in the Agricultural Sciences Program at Cornell. My agricultural internship experience is a little unique as it has been split up between the winter of 2018-19 and the summer of 2019. Over the winter intercession, I will spend around three weeks in Dr. Quirine Ketterings’s lab in the Nutrient Management Spear Program (NMSP) learning about digital agriculture—specifically crop yield data information and data cleaning. This summer, I will be working at Osterhoudt Farms in my lovely hometown of Genoa, New York.
I am very excited to be spending the summer in my happy hometown!
Osterhoudt Farms is a custom planting/harvest operation of alfalfa and corn. These products are mainly sold to dairy farms in the area. Osterhoudt Farms has around 2,000 acres of privately-owned ground in production, and custom plants and harvests an additional approximate 4,000 acres of corn and 2,000 acres of alfalfa/grass hay for a grand total of worked ground falling around 10,000 acres spread throughout the entire county!
Working closely with Osterhoudt Farm’s on-staff crop consultant, Andy Miller, I hope to learn some of Andy’s roles and responsibilities in advising and helping manage a large farming operation, and will also be connecting the winter portion of my internship by observing some practical on-farm uses for digital agriculture and yield data information. We also hope to be doing some rather large-scale field trials to test some crop and nutrient variables, but more to come on that topic this summer! Hopefully, the unique in-lab to on-farm leap can provide some useful information to the farm as well as some feedback for the NMSP.
Osterhoudt Custom Harvesting’s employee and fan favorite picture (from the 2014 Silage harvest)