After the scary frost over Memorial Day Weekend, the beautiful summer weather has finally decided to stick around in Iowa. This week I decided to stay within the Iowa border and enjoy the warm sunshine. My Ford Explorer found its way along I-80 all week headed east toward Iowa City. This week as I rode along with Dave Hoy, a Technical Team Agronomist, and Spencer Shalla, a Sales Account Manager, I realized most of Iowa is small towns and filled with the nicest farmers you will ever meet. As Iowan’s like to call it “Iowa Nice.”

Due to the frost over Memorial Day weekend Dave, Spencer and I went out to some fields that farmers were worried about. Luckily, in southeast Iowa we didn’t see much frost damage on corn that the farmers needed to be worried about. If there was any frost damage at all, it was on some of the older leaves, and the new leaves coming out of the whorl were dark green and healthy.  Since the growing point wasn’t exposed quite yet, Dave thought that everything will grow out of it in a few days and be just fine. This stage of growing point in corn and soybeans is extremely vulnerable and if something goes wrong, such as severe frost damage, farmers may lose all their time and money that they put into the ground. As my dad would always say, “farming is a gambling game.” I found a growing point within myself while doing these frost evaluations. I learned how to calm down anxious farmers and explain to them what we see in their fields.

The next day, I found myself in Wapello, Iowa helping Spencer put in one of his last plots of the year. Putting in a plot was a whole new level of learning for me. Spencer taught me all about the different varieties that we were planting and why we were planting them in the plot. There is a lot more planning that goes into planting a plot than I ever knew. Each pass we had to vacuum out leftover seed in the seed boxes and fill back up with a new variety. Thank goodness the farmer planting the plot knew what he was doing and was patient.

This week my knowledge of the agronomy industry grew tremendously. That is the glory of being the Marketing Intern for LG Seeds. I love that each week is something completely different. Some weeks I learn about corn and soybeans, and other weeks I learn about the marketing side of the business. I think it’s the best of both worlds. Stay tuned for next week’s adventure as I will be taking in the beauty of central Missouri and seeing how their crops are doing.