Workforce Wednesday: Meet a Crop Management Specialist
“I would say I am the eyes and the ears for farmers,” Kelly Verhaalen, a Crop Management Specialist, said.
Verhaalen works at Allied Cooperative Pest Pros in Plainfield, Wis. She loves the challenge of every growing season being different.
“Weather is so unpredictable, so even though you saw a crop one year doesn't mean that it's going to even act the same way the next year,” she said. “Every year is a new kind of ball game. I'm always learning and that's challenging, but also keeps it interesting.”
Verhaalen says she did not have a background in agriculture but found her way to her career path through courses she wanted to take in college.
“I took an entomology class, so looking at bugs, and I really wanted to learn about plant diseases,” Verhaalen said.
At the time, she was majoring in Microbiology and was not able to take plant pathology courses as a Microbiology student. Because of this, she decided to double major in both Microbiology and Plant Pathology. She earned two degrees from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She credits her career path to both her course work and her experience working in a research laboratory applying lab-based research to carrot fields.
“I kind of fell in love with the field work aspect through that lab job,” Verhaalen said. “With my added plant pathology major, it brought me into agriculture that way.”
Though the weather keeps her on her toes, she is most excited as a Crop Management Specialist that the future of farming is focused on soil health.
“The future of farming seems to be looking more at soil health and looking at what the small things are doing in your farm field,” she said. “That seems really exciting to me because that's what I went to school for.”
Though her position is in research, she spends a lot of time outdoors, especially during the summer growing months. Her days are spent evaluating 10-15 farm fields each day.
“We are working with irrigation fields,” she said. “So, I get to walk a giant circle following those tracks, and we carry a sweep net, which is our data collection tool. Besides our eyes visibly seeing any disease or nutrient deficiencies, the sweep nets are there to catch our bugs and quantify those.”
Part of the evaluation process is taking samples from fields, growing cultures and analyzing the data to provide growers with a disease risk rating.
“With my job, it is really unique in that I'm a crop consultant. I'm not a salesperson,” she said. “Crop consulting allows for a slightly different relationship with the farmer than you would as a salesperson in that it is purely advising certain products from a scientific basis and not because my company is selling something. That level of trust with the farmers that you get and having that responsibility that it's not only your job on the line, but it is their career and just knowing that you're helping them out, that is pretty awesome.”
Verhaalen said no matter a person’s background, they can be successful in crop management.
“You just have to have an interest in plants, being outdoors and learning more, and that can take you a long way,” Verhaalen said. “There are so many people that I work with at my job that we all came from different paths. It doesn't matter if you have a farming background, you can still do this job.”
