Cam Bell, a second-year Agricultural Business Management major at the Institute of Applied Agriculture, plans to own and operate a pig farm which led him to intern at Lippy Brother’s Inc. Located near Bell’s home in Carroll County, MD, Lippy Brother’s Inc. is, as Bell describes, “a “family owned grain farm that produces wheat, barley, hay, straw, and a lot more.”
Notice the lack of livestock in the description. Although he plans a career with swine, Bell found the internship fitting to his future plans. He says interning at a grain farm was fitting because it taught him skills that will be useful for his pig farm.
Bell had several responsibilities at his internship that he enjoyed tremendously. He stacked and delivered straw, harvested crops, and worked with machinery. Bell has been working on farms his entire life, but a skill that he significantly improved and became more comfortable with was operating machinery. He is excited about how much he learned about machinery and finds that it will be extremely beneficial in the future.
Bell’s favorite part of his summer internship was producing hay and harvesting crops. He especially enjoyed the production of hay because he found it “serene to see the process it takes to make the hay.” One thing Bell did not expect to be doing this summer was ripping up a grain bin. The old grain bin needed the floor to be replaced with new metal and cinder blocks. Bell and some co-workers had to rip up the metal and move 2,000 cinder blocks out of the way in order to suck up the grain that had leaked through the floor. Then, they had to relay the new cinder block and place the new floor on top.
By completing a summer internship that is related to his future career goals, Bell learned a lot. He got to see firsthand how an agricultural business runs, which will help him when he runs his own agriculture business.
