My name is Chase Thompson (They/Them), and I am from Frederick, Maryland pursuing environmental stewardship at the IAA. I interned at the University of Delaware's Fresh To You vegetable farm as an assistant. While there, I harvested vegetables, pruned tomatoes, seeded beds, weeded, and composted old plants. My favorite part of the job was harvesting herbs as it was relaxing and allowed me to breathe in the herbs' aroma, but a close second activity was filling raised beds with fresh ground compost from a large pile using a small tractor.
During my time at the farm, many cool things happened, but the coolest was when a giant hawk landed and took off in front of me within 15 feet of me. To me, the most significant thing I did was seed beds for the next year, as that is an investment that will still be there when I am not at the farm, outliving my internship and proving to be helpful past my time. This is incredibly moving to me as there is now a part of me that will last at that farm, and help to feed more people through the community-supported agriculture program. The most upsetting part of the job was when insects would infest crops and we would have to be done with the crop for a while, such as when aphids infested our lettuce and we had to rip up the crop to let the beds recover before seeding again. Happenings like this taught me how to handle pests, like the time harlequin beetles infested our kale and we had to either squish them or pluck them off the leaves and drop them into buckets of soapy water, and spray soapy water on the kale.
This internship has made me want to pursue a hands-on career with lots of instruction from a supervisor, or a management position career where I get to make the calls on what to do surrounding both small and large decisions. During my internship, I was also asked by the university to do research on anything of interest to me, so I chose plant pigments. I researched and created plant pigments during my time at the university, even turning them into watercolors and presenting them to other students and faculty during the university's research symposium. Toward the end of my internship, I was also able to attend the Delaware State Fair with the rest of my program and hand out flash drives with all of our combined research on them. All of these different experiences shaped me in ways that I didn’t know they could, showing me the inner workings of small farms and research, and I am ecstatic to continue my career in agriculture.
