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  • Cornell Cooperative Extension
  • Animal Science
  • Biological and Environmental Engineering
  • Field Crops
  • Dairy

 In the summer of 2024, Lily Blyn, Cornell CALS’ Environmental Engineering ’25, interned with Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE), the PRO-DAIRY program and the Nutrient Management Spear Program (NMSP). Through these programs, she had the opportunity to assist with community outreach and conduct research in the field and the lab. We sat down with her to dive into her experiences and find out what she learned.

Cornell Cooperative Extension

Tell us about your activities with CCE.

In the beginning of the summer, I worked closely with Janice Degni who leads the Cornell Cooperative South Central New York Dairy and Field Crops Program. I accompanied her on farm visits where we walked people’s fields and investigated any issues they had. 

I helped her set up and run stations at educational events where elementary school students could learn about different topics relating to agriculture, such as manure storage and what goes into feeding dairy cows.

In addition, I collaborated with Frank Clark, agricultural educator with the Cayuga County CCE, office on a project where we sampled water from tile drainage outlets, measured the flow rates and compared the results to previous years.

What part of your internship with CCE did you enjoy the most?

I really enjoyed the farm visits. Seeing different operations and meeting the farmers was interesting– a wide variety of people reached out to CCE for help. It was nice to see both experienced farmers looking for second opinions and new farmers asking for advice about unique crops, some of which I’d never heard of before.

I also appreciated how CCE prioritized exposing kids to agriculture. Working with Janice during the outreach days, I was impressed by how the local schools all made an effort to take kids on field trips to surrounding dairy farms. 

PRO-DAIRYNMSP

Your responsibilities with PRO-DAIRY involved helping out with the 2024 North American Manure Expo. Tell us about that.

I assisted Kirsten Workman (PRO-DAIRY Nutrient Management and Environmental Sustainability Specialist) with a lot of the 2024 manure expo logistics and staffing. I reached out to volunteers and helped ensure that attendees could receive continuing education credits for attending talks and demonstrations.

Through working with Kirsten and other manure expo organizers and attending the expo, I gained a new awareness about and appreciation for all the effort that goes into constantly improving manure management systems. Researchers and farmers all took time to come share what they know or learn about manure.

What kind of research did you do with NMSP?

I mostly helped out with the rainfall simulation project alongside Carlos Irias and other team members in the lab. We looked at the nutrient and sediment loss from manure treated soils and examined the infiltration and runoff from multiple rainfall events. 

I wrote many updates about the rainfall simulation trials in my CCE blog, but for the most part I helped with running the trials, collecting water samples and calibrating the system. I also assisted with some soil sampling for another NMSP project and I joined NMSP and PRO-DAIRY on field trips.

Takeaways

What was it like to have so many experiences packed together in one summer?

I’m majoring in environmental engineering, so I didn’t have much experience with agriculture outside of the vegetable farm that I grew up on, and I especially didn’t have much experience working with or teaching about dairy. 

With Frank’s project, it was cool to see people within the extension program conducting research they are genuinely interested in— it became really clear to me that there could be a lot more research in each area. I got to learn more about what it means to implement what I’ve learned about tile drainage in a practical sense. I had to think more about the cycle of nutrients in agriculture and both the environmental and social implications of nutrient concentrations.

For one of our field trips, interns and staff from NMSP went to Northern New York and visited the Miner Institute. The Miner institute has been collecting tile drainage data for many years and has an automated sampler system. Learning about the research they are conducting and the history of tile drainage provided me with more perspective on the small-scale project I was working on.

The internship culminated in a poster session which gave me the opportunity to present my findings and experiences to professionals in related fields and to peers who had been interning on other projects. Through this experience, I was able to make connections and gain insight surrounding the projects and their impacts. 

Overall, what did you learn?

I didn’t know anything about extension when I joined the internship program, so seeing how much of a resource it can be was really interesting. I wish that every school could have agriculture incorporated into elementary school through hands-on field trips.

This internship showed me that in agricultural research relationships built on trust are key— between farmers, extension, educators and researchers– I was able to look into a lot of different areas in a very short time period and see how they can all come together to cultivate a better agricultural system.

 

If you are a Cornell CALS undergraduate student interested in applying to a similar internship program with CCE, PRO-DAIRY and NMSP, check out this year's hands-on internship: Advancing Dairy Sustainability through On-Farm Nutrient Management Research and Extension.

Madeline Hanscom is a writer for the Nutrient Management Spear Program.

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