Careers Beyond the Farm is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money by the vote of the people, 2008.

As technology and science advance, so do the many options for careers in agriculture.

So many of these specialties encompass so much more than our traditional views of farming.

I'm Ann Vote.

Come with me to explore the fulfilling and lucrative careers beyond the farm.

[Music] What would you say to students who believe, I don't know anything about agriculture, I don't even think I want to do anything in agriculture, what would be your response to them?

I think you should really think seriously about agriculture, and the reason is is agriculture is what produces food for everyone and the last time I checked everybody has to eat on this planet, so agriculture is going to be one of those aspects or one of those jobs in the agricultural field that's always going to exist.

So if you really want to be involved at the ground level, produce food for people, whatever those products or whatever the phase of agriculture that you'd like to be in, it's a very vast and wide array, and I would just, I would not want to see students sell themselves short or discount agriculture as being an option for them.

It's not something that you have to come from a farm to be involved with, there are many aspects of the industry you can get exposed to with virtually no agricultural background whatsoever.

What advice would you give to students curious about agriculture or thinking about agriculture as a career?

So I had that conversation with my daughter, just turned 14, she shows real interest in ag and I encouraged her that if it's something you want to do, seek people out that have been doing it and then utilize that.

Utilize dad, grandpa, neighbors, FFA advisors, extension agents.

I say utilize those people to build your knowledge because it's easier to do it when you're young and start to grasp what things are before you decide hey, I'm going to go do this as an adult and then fall on your face.

Because there's a lot to learn, and for kids that haven't grown up around it, we take it for granted when we grow up around that, you know, we just have that general knowledge of how things work, we understand the equipment, we understand the seasons and the importance of timing.

For anybody that hasn't done it, it's a complete, it's overwhelming if you're trying to just go out and do it for the first time.

My dad, her grandpa, did a really good job at telling me to go talk to people that do it because he didn't do it full-time, whole hog I mean, it was his part-time deal on the side of his normal job.

And so he said go talk to the ones that do it all the time and figure out what they do and what they would encourage you to do to learn.

Learn about soils, learn about conservation, learn about plants and insects, the sciences in general.

It encompasses so much more.

But then also be an accountant and also be a economist.

You know you got to understand markets, it's not just a one-sided deal.

Getting hands on, digging in, trying new things that you're not necessarily familiar with and figuring out what works and what doesn't work and how to progress from there.

Like address the challenges at hand and finding solutions to it and that's not only finding solutions by yourself but also knowing your friends in the business, your colleagues in the business, people that you know that have experienced that in the past and networking.

So we want people that are not satisfied to just be the mundane, I come to work, I put this box in this spot and that's what I do.

You know, that's not the people we're looking for.

We're looking for people who want to want to be the best they can be because that's what it's going to require for us to have our small staff here that's going to have the flexibility to do all the different things we're going to do.

There is no mundane job at the Ag Innovation Campus.

You know we're going to be operating in this facility on commodity products maybe for a week and then we'll have to shift and we'll be operating a specialty run.

Well then we might operate running a different oil seed and everything is different and we need people that are able to function in that type of environment.

And, you know, people that are high performers, they want to make the best of themselves and the companies they work for.

Just knowing that where I live there's only so many Industries really that you can have longevity in.

You know, construction, agriculture, and then other things in our area.

We have Simplot, we have Marvin Windows, we have Crystal Sugar.

I mean they're all still sort of ag related.

I guessed eventually I would land there and I spent a lot of my career in construction and now I'm in ag, so.

Give me advice for students who hear your story, what can you tell them as they're going through middle school, high school, and thinking about agriculture as a career.

Do what you love.

Agriculture, it's not just farming.

I mean it's tractor driving, it's GPS, it's precision farming nowadays.

It's you don't have to be in the field, you can be in a tractor, you could work at a John Deere store and work with technology for the tractors.

Agriculture was so widespread on anything you could do so find something you like.

If you love being outside, get into farming.

I didn't have the opportunity to farm on my own.

It's hard to farm, you know, start out on your own.

So it's nice to go work for somebody that, you know, if you love farming go work for that farmer, if you love driving tractors go find somewhere where you can, you know, drive tractors.

There's just it's such a wide variety of jobs in the ag world and this world needs ag.

What advice would you give students going into the field of agriculture or even just them thinking about their future career, what's something you'd love to tell young people?

Sometimes you're going to fail at something and that's okay because that will point you in another direction and eventually you'll get to the right place.

Tell me about how you got to the role you're in now.

So I started off in agriculture and fishing.

I didn't like working in production in a fish plant, so I went to trade school and took HVAC and Refrigeration Technologies, got a job as a ammonia refrigeration operator, did some more course work for boilers and worked into working on both high pressure boilers for the canning process and the refrigeration side and progressed to where I'm at today.

Where did you start?

So I started off here as the boiler and refrigeration team leader.

Okay, you did.

Yes.

So you walked into that position.

Yes.

So prior to that what were you doing?

So prior to that I went from operator to lead mechanic to PSM coordinator, which is Process Safety Management, and then became a refrigeration supervisor, PSM manager.

And now here at Lamb Weston as the boiler and refrigeration team leader.

Tell me more.

Okay and during that time I worked my way through school.

So we went from trade school to an associates degree to an engineering degree.

Okay, where did you get that at?

So I have my Bachelor of Science Applied Engineering from wonderful Bemidji State University.

I started out as a hairdresser out of high school and realized probably within 10 years that you really can't make a lot of money in this area, so I decided to go back to school.

I got my associates in accounting at Northland Tech in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, and then I transferred to University of Minnesota Crookston and got my accounting degree, my bachelor's degree there, and then I went to in North Dakota, I went to University of Mary and got my Masters in Business Administration.

So I grew up on our family farm right east of East Grand Forks here.

So I live just a couple miles away from there.

I just bought the house on our farm.

So growing up on the farm I knew I had a passion for agriculture and it was something I wanted to do, but I suffered from really bad seasonal allergies so I didn't do well in grain harvest, things like that on our farm.

So I knew I was going to go to college for something in agriculture, but I couldn't decide what that was.

So when I came out of high school I went into our Northwest Technical College here right in East Grand Forks and I just started doing my generals and then from there was trying to decide where I wanted to transfer to to get my four-year degree.

So I landed on agronomy, and I went over to the University of Minnesota Crookston.

I'd heard there's a lot of job openings in agronomy and I dealt with local agronomists on our farm so I knew it was something that I would be interested in.

So I did start that out, and then I had a friend who did an internship at American Crystal and he recommended it to me, so I started off as an intern in our East Grand Forks and Crookston districts and then when I graduated college from UMC in 2017 I started right in as an agriculturist up in our Drayton district.

I was up there for about 5 years then I came, transferred down to East Grand Forks just to be a little bit closer to home.

In high school we had, in Coleraine there, we had quite a bit of like shop classes and different machine shop stuff.

I know that wasn't a, it wasn't a big thing in a lot of other schools, but in ours we still kind of held on to that in the Iron Range, so we got a lot of exposure to that kind of stuff, got to do some college welding courses in high school.

So I think, you know, in the high school setting I actually had quite a bit of opportunities for the trade side and then kind of seeing how that fit with me did I want to be in the trades, did I want to go into a four-year program, you know how did that all work out.

And I would say it really wasn't until my senior year that I kind of got pushed into what are you going to do and I'm like well, I'm pretty good with math, pretty good with science, you know, what kind of fits that, what do I like to do.

I like to create, I like to build, so engineering kind of became that avenue for me.

And where did you go and what degree did you walk away with?

So I started out at Itasca Community College, did the two-year engineering program there.

What I liked about that was in my school, in high school, I wasn't caught up with math, so they do block courses in which case you can get caught up on your math in the two years.

So I did that, went to NDSU, I wasn't a fan, and then I transferred up to UND.

So just kind of personal preference but had some buddies that were up at UND, got back up with them and it ended up being a good decision for me.

To be ahead of the game, 30 years ago, people were trained on the job or they went to trade school, which is what I did.

So to set myself apart I went and I got an associates degree in HVAC Refrigeration Technologies from the University of Alaska and that kind of set me apart.

Moving forward though that became the norm, you know, started about 10-15 years ago everybody had that so I continued on and pursued a business degree, but that didn't pay the same as the blue collar position I had.

Okay.

Sometimes trades, especially skilled trades, can be very good both financially as well as for a stable work environment.

You're always in demand.

Absolutely.

I am a huge believer in trade school and one of the great things about going to a trade school or a technical college is you learn valuable skills, not just for the workplace but for life.

So if you want to call a plumber or an electrician or anything for every little job at your house that's great, but a trade school can teach you a lot of these little things regardless of the program that you're in.

Tell me a little bit about your background, where are you from, what do you do, how'd you get into your role you're in now.

So I was born here in Park Rapids, Minnesota, and I actually grew up in western Wisconsin, Durand, Wisconsin.

I've been around farming my whole life.

My dad started in the potato business before I even was born.

I had grandparents that milked cows.

Where I grew up in western Wisconsin, back then every mile was a dairy farm, so all my best friends from school.

When I worked in high school I worked on dairy farms.

I always enjoyed animals, I always enjoyed crops.

With my dad being in the potato profession my whole life, I would help him on the weekends or I'd pull weeds in the summertime.

I just I've always loved farming, whether it's animals or crops, and so that's what I did all the way up through high school.

So right at the end of high school what happens, what do you do?

Well at the end of high school I went and started working for RD Offutt Farms right away, right out of high school.

I started at the bottom.

I loaded up potatoes at night, but I had that drive, I wanted to become a manager, so I wanted to learn every aspect of the farm from the bottom to the top.

So I was in it for two years and then I wanted to learn more about irrigation.

So there wasn't nothing available here on the Park Rapids farm, so I actually moved to Nebraska to be able to learn irrigation.

So I ran irrigation there a couple years, worked my way up to run a little small 500 acre farm in Bassett, Nebraska, had the opportunity to come back to Minnesota where most of my family lives and become a team lead and then eventually went and got into management and that's where I am today.

So I think, you know, middle school as soon as you're able to go out and get some experience go get some experience.

Just be willing to go out and work.

Almost any trade is willing to take young students, train them.

You know if you want to be an electrician, you want to be a plumber, anything in the trades, go spend some time, spend a summer in each trade.

You know decide if you want to be an electrician, go work as an electrician as an apprentice, as a laborer.

You know you may end up being a laborer.

You may, you know, by the end of the summer you may have experience pulling a wire and, you know, and say okay, well, I really don't like electrical I'm going to go do something different.

I've seen people manage trades, jumping from one trade to another, and they're successful.

Most of the people that I see in the management, you know in the construction management, the site superintendent, you know, if you kind of picture a site superintendent they know how to do every trade.

You know I've worked with guys that the site superintendent will pull on to the job site, he's got every tool in the trailer.

He doesn't do every trade but he can fix everything.

Excellent.

What does a construction consultant do?

So a construction consultant is the owner's eyes and ears for a construction project, basically works in the owner's interest.

You know smaller owners don't have the opportunity to have an onsite or on staff construction owners rep, so I hire out as a consultant.

You know where like McDonald's, Marriott, they have people on staff that do that all day, you know, I give owners an opportunity to bring some experience to the project, to be there, you know, work in their interest to, you know, build the project.

William tell me a little bit about what you do as an agronomist.

As an agronomist I'm basically a plant doctor.

So I spend my time out walking in the fields and checking on the plants, making observations.

A lot of times plants will tell you what's going on with them just by the way they look.

Tell me what a crop consultant is and does.

A little bit of everything.

So, you're once a week you try to get across every acre, every field.

You diagnose and first you identify problems and then try to figure out what it is.

And it's not always that easy.

It takes a lot of time and you want a good network of people, professionals you can work with and ask cuz odds are somebody that's been doing it for 20 years has probably seen it so, as you go along, but yeah just investigating a problem and then figuring out how to either mitigate the problem or solve it.

What would be your advice for students looking at going into an agricultural field whether that be farming or crop consulting or even in leadership within an organization?

I'd say reach out to a few individuals you might already know, ask them how they did it, don't necessarily think you have to go a four-year path in college, there is a lot of great trade schools, two-year, and it helps maybe you refine where you're going to go.

But definitely reach out to the organizations like Minnesota Soybean Growers, the Minnesota Soybean Research and Promotion Council, local agronomists, fertilizer managers.

These people will definitely help you out and steer you in the direction and they'll be resources for life that you'll have.

Tell me a little bit about your day-to-day, what do you do every day in your job?

I work with our production planning team and our operations team to put together production schedules that allow us to meet our customer demand and work with our ag group to bring those potatoes in that meet those customer demand quality attributes.

So much has changed and so to be able to pinpoint exactly what a customer wants and to be able to produce that and then they decide well I want to try something else right.

There's just this avenue there, customers do that.

So we produce a certain amount of product expecting that's going to sell and then all of a sudden it's not selling, we got to shift gears and make something else.

And so being on top of that and having a better market presence has been one of the biggest learnings and biggest challenges in the recent years.

I applied to several different locations and got hired on here in Park Rapids, Minnesota in 2005, and I thought well I'll learn about the business, I'll learn how to manufacture french fries, then I'll go into the sales and marketing side and use my skills that I had acquired.

And through the process what I've learned is I really enjoy the manufacturing side of what the business has to offer and I still get to use my degree, whether it's communications with our employees, our customers, our competitors, even our, you know, our grower partners, those guys.

It's a lot of communications, it's a lot about public relations, and so being able to express the things that I enjoy doing, the things I went to school for, but doing it in an environment where I feel like I can thrive and have an impact on other people's lives has been an awesome journey.

Within American Crystal is it easy to move positions, how does that work?

Yes it is.

Knowledge and determination, you can always move up with American Crystal Sugar.

What would be your advice for students looking to get into a career like your own?

Well, first of all you got to have some kind of factory knowledge.

If not they will train you for everything that you need to know.

You got to have the will and the determination that you want to work here.

What would you say is the best part of your job?

Oh my supervisors and my employees and HR and the whole shebang.

Co-workers.

The co-workers and all.

What would you say to a student who is looking to get into a position like your own, what are some things they need to be thinking about or doing or maybe need schooling in?

Tell me a little bit about that process.

Most trucking managers probably are able to drive a truck and have a CDL, which I do not.

So the people that we hire, we require they have a CDL.

Coming out of school, if they wanted to get into a position, just start, you know you have to start at the bottom and work your way up.

I was always told when I was a kid that the only job you start at the top is digging a hole, and so you work at, you start at the bottom and you work your way up.

I started in the office, you know, part-time and I think all of RD Offutt companies management people have all started out at the bottom doing, you know, doing whatever they have to do.

So it's just one of those things that as a manager I don't think you're going to just jump right into it.

I don't think there's any two-year or four-year degree that's going to prepare you for a position like this.

It's something that you just have to learn as you go.

What is some advice you would give to students who are thinking of going into a career with marketing or promotions, what are some things you're looking for when you hire individuals?

People often ask me, you know, what are you going to do when you hire someone, what is that number one skill you're looking for?

Curiosity.

I think that's and then problem solving.

I think too many people today rely on someone else to tell them what to do or how to do it or what to think and how to think and that's like the worst, that's the anti-curious, right, everyone's telling you what to do.

So for me, I think that when I hire, I look for someone who who can problem solve.

I don't mind that they're going to ask me questions, I want to teach and mentor, but at the same time, you know, that ability to just think it through.

We have this friend, Google, and everyone goes to Google and, you know, you can find a lot of answers, you can learn to be a lot of things nowadays if you're just curious.

Let's say you're hiring for a maintenance employee, what kind of skills are you looking for kids or students to come in with, whether we're talking degrees or not, but what kind of personal skills do you want them walking in the door with?

So a lot of it comes down to the person, really, you got to read a person and their drive.

What I look for is not necessarily their skills, their willingness to learn.

So I guess for me the skills that I think that I need would be you got to be able to have an open mind, for sure, you've got to be able to also be fairly confident with what you're saying and be able to be confident when you know that something isn't right and be confident to know when you need help or you're wrong or someone else is not quite right.

You ought to be able to speak up.

As far as just kind of technical skills, I would say you definitely need to have kind of an aptitude for some math, some science.

I wouldn't say you necessarily have to be as hands on as a lot of people describe engineers to be.

I don't consider myself to be a super hands on person.

I like to problem solve, but I'm not really the type who's going to open up a car hood and be able to rip out a car engine and tell you exactly what everything is.

So I guess you just have to have a ability to want to learn and figure things out and have some patience because I mean there's things that I'm working on that this factory is having issues with that no one's been able to or no one's really looked into or figured out for a few years now.

So patience is a big one, determination, and then yeah just your basic math, science.

Those are probably the basic ones.

What skills could students be harnessing and focusing on in their schoolwork now, that you really need as an agriculturalist?

If you have people skills I think you can be an agriculturist, the rest of it I think can be learned.

It's not a heavy math induced thing.

There's certainly math involved but it's one of those jobs that as long as you take it seriously and want to learn each step along the way, I think there's potential for almost anybody who's interested in agriculture to be able to find a job in agriculture.

What kind of skills do you need working in the position that you have now, or even as I heard you tell your story you really had a lot of different positions going on, what are some skills that you kind of used throughout that whole time?

I think honesty and integrity is always the key of everything.

So knowing who you are and being comfortable in your own skin to be able to talk to whoever you're talking to and know what your storyline is.

But, more importantly, don't augment that storyline any more than necessary.

People want to do business with people they can trust and that's probably, again, something that you learn on the farm and so I think that's really helped my career as much as anything.

Careers Beyond the Farm was made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money by the vote of the people, 2008.