Andrea Campos

 

I like how my mentors do little Weed Identification Pop- Quizzes! This one is Mare’s tail. The second time I identified it - I called it Horses hair, so I was on the right track.

🖤Andrea’s Adventures🖤

Start Date: 5/4/24

Hello! Now that I am entering the third week of the internship, I’ve been able to learn so much about Weed Identification and the Agricultural Pests that have been on the rise currently in Maryland. Crop scouting not only brings me back to when I took my Insect Classification and Taxonomy class, but also to my Agriculture Pest Management course that I took my sophomore year of college. I think back to that class with Dr. Hamilton during the beginning of the pandemic. My class was virtual -so the on the field experience and ability to talk to farmers was not the same as that of a regular in person classroom experience. Now that I am in the internships and able to go out to the fields and explore and learn to better my skills in weed identification. 

Some goals that I have for this internship is to help produce more social media content across the three counties that I am working with. I also want to help the local 4 H program in my county develop more Entomology based workshops and seminars. Some career goals that I have is to develop my livestock judging skills and hopefully to train to become a livestock judge for local county fairs. 

I learned a lot this week from a variety of really cool people in the Agriculture Extension field ! I spoke to Susan- a previous Small ruminant Specialist and she gave me some good advice on what you can do as an extension agent and how important it is to broaden your horizons and travel to gain more experience and knowledge in the agricultural field.

The previous week I was fortunate enough to attend a Biocontrol and Pest Management conference in Carroll County and I listened into several lectures about Biocontrol across the state. My favorite lecture was the first one that discussed mycoinsecticides and how companies are moving towards developing more products that use biocontrol methods. The various speakers were so interesting and I thoroughly enjoyed the event! I got to mingle and network with some companies and other plant science or entomologists. I even got to see a speaker from Rutgers and he gave a very informative lecture! And at the end of the day we got to watch a live demonstration of drones that deposit insect eggs on orchard fields. Being able to attend this conference just got me more excited and interested in working in the Agricultural Extension field. 

Here is a wheat field we passed as we were doing some crop scouting in Beltsville, MD.

On our way back from crop scouting- Mark drove past this national park to show me the importance of the trading C and O Canal.