Marketing Intern

My name is Emi Huls, I was born and raised in Aurora Nebraska. I completed my freshman year at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and I am planning on completing my education at Northeast Community College, majoring in Animal Science and Agribusiness. This summer, I am the marketing intern at the Aurora Cooperative under Tessa Burgener in the Main Office.

What brought me to the Aurora Cooperative as an intern this summer was my passion for agriculture and helping producers. I grew up on an acreage north of Aurora. My dad was a school administrator, and in 2019, he left the school system to go back to his roots and started working for a large, local row crop farmer. My older brother graduated and began his own row-crop operation and started running cattle right out of high school. Although I did not grow up on a farm, I grew up immersed in the agriculture industry. My dad grew up on a dairy and row-crop operation in a small town in southeast Nebraska called Pickrell, so growing up, the grandkids were commonly seen “helping” on the Huls operation during busy seasons. I remember hauling grain to the Pickrell elevator with my grandma. At the time, I was not thinking of all the work that cooperatives do for their local producers. In high school, I was heavily involved in the National FFA Organization. FFA exposed me to so many aspects of agriculture. Throughout my time in FFA and my experiences in leadership positions in the chapter, I can confidently say that one of my favorite events to host was the Producers Appreciation Meal, where producers were able to come have dinner, on the chapter, with their families. I have always known that wherever I end up, I will be doing something in agriculture. Growing up around agriculture in Aurora has helped me realize how important supporting local producers is, and I think the Aurora Cooperative does just that, which made it an easy choice to be one of their interns this summer.

My workdays at the co-op look different every day. Some days I am at my desk working on projects, and other days I am working in different locations with the media team on photo and video shoots and projects. I started the summer by creating a social media calendar, where I took all our posts from the last 12 months and recorded what we posted, on which platform, and when it was posted. Then, I began working on Aurora Cooperative Grain Originator Introduction videos that will be used to help producers see the faces of the people that they are selling their grain to. After this project, I started working on an Allied Nutrition Product book, reformatting product sheets for each of the Allied salesmen and creating product guides. I am finishing the summer with a social media audit, doing research on how our posts are performing and what content is gaining traction. Based on all my projects, it is pretty apparent that I am dipping my toes in all aspects of the cooperative, I have enjoyed gaining exposure to the grain, agronomy, corporate, nutrition, and sales sides of things and becoming more knowledgeable about our products and strategies.

So far, the experiences that I have gained have been insightful. I am looking forward to seeing how my projects end up, I have had a lot of fun starting all my projects and learning as I go, which has been way out of my comfort zone. I am so glad that I got to experience this internship and explore a different area of the industry, all while gaining tons of exposure and experience along the way. I was nervous about taking the marketing internship at the beginning of the summer since I have never really explored the marketing world, but now I am seeing that the cooperative put me right where I needed to be to make me successful and allow me to learn.