ABM Senior Mackenzie Strong is Spending Her Summer as a Row Crop Production Intern with Bayer
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EmailMackenzie Strong is working with Bayer Crop Sciences for the summer in Fargo, North Dakota as a row crop production intern.
For the past two years, Mackenzie Strong has been working through summer and fall internships to explore what agricultural career would be in her future. Strong has interned as a crop scout in apple orchards and ran pea harvesters with Gerber Foods; now, on her third internship, Strong packed up and moved 800 miles away to Fargo, North Dakota to intern with Bayer through August.
Strong, a senior in Agribusiness Management in the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics (AFRE), has known she wanted to pursue a career in agriculture since growing up in around the ag community in St. Louis, Michigan and attributes it to the people.
“I think it's the culture,” Strong explained. “I find that the people in ag just are down to earth and I feel like when you're on the farm, they appreciate the little things. I wanted to be involved in ag; so, I just reached out and it worked!”
Now, Strong is working as a row crop production intern for Bayer Crop Science. In this position, Strong is shadowing several employees from the office to field who are helping her make this internship into what she would like it to be. She has worked to help map fields for growers, inspecting the fields and counting plants, and even became forklift certified.
Later this summer, Strong will also complete a capstone project as part of her internship. Strong will be focusing on how the company and growers can work to maintain the quality of the soybean seed.
She will be working with growers while doing field inspecting. Her and her boss will identify five growers in the surrounding area to assess the quality of their seed, storage bins, and maintenance.
Strong has enjoyed her current and past internships and believes there is great value for students in AFRE to take part in internships.
“Internships give you a good perspective of what a company is like,” Strong shared. “If you are wanting to be with a company for a career, [internships] help you decide on what you do and don't like. It helps you decipher what you do and don't want to do before you sign a piece of paper saying you're going to commit to it for so long.”
Strong will wrap up her internship on August 9th, which will be just in time to start her last year at Michigan State University!
