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2022 SUMMER INTERNS: PJ Schaben

Aurora Cooperative 2 years ago

Hello everyone, my name is PJ Schaben, and I am an Agronomy Sales intern working at the Aurora Agronomy location with Drew Buettner. I’m from Seward, Nebraska, and this Fall, I’ll be a senior at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri, majoring in Agronomy and Agribusiness. I have had the opportunity to hold several different jobs in agriculture on the research and commercial side.

I have grown so much since the beginning of my internship in May and have gotten to see many different things with the eventful weather this summer, and how growers and the Coop have responded. The efforts put into getting seed back into the ground were a whole team effort. Some of the other opportunities I have had include weekly tissue samples which we started by doing flag tests on Yield Advantage growers. More interesting things I have gotten to experience, are how corn rootworm can affect the roots of corn plants. I also got to experience the damage that Japanese beetles can do to the leaves of soybeans.

For my summer project, I will be applying Utrisha N nitrogen efficiency product through the pivot onto soybeans. Utrisha N is a biological product that colonizes onto the leaves and fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere, converting it into ammonium for the plant. We are looking to see if this product will be able to sustain nitrogen throughout the entire pod fill stage and into harvest. To test this, we are taking weekly tissue samples to get a baseline. We will be applying this product when the soybeans are nearly canopied, that way to get the most

I took my first crossover day following around the District Sales Manager for the Aurora region, and my goal for that was to learn more about hybrid placement in a field.  My goal for the summer was to learn the sales process of an Ag-retailer throughout the entire growing season. The first half of my internship exceeded this goal all thanks to the team at Aurora Cooperative.

PJ Schaben