Pioneer Hi-Bred growing bio careers

LASALLE – From the seeds of an idea, careers can sprout.

That’s the idea behind the student internship program at Pioneer Hi-bred International Inc., the world’s leading developer and supplier of advanced plant genetics for farmers.

“For us, internships are a testing ground,” explained Bill Curran, a research scientist and location manager for Pioneer’s LaSalle Research Center in Weld County. “We see qualities we like and hope we have employment opportunities that interest the students.”

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There’s certainly job potential at Pioneer, a subsidiary of multinational corporation DuPont. The seed company operates in 70 countries and has 45 research stations and 48 production plants dealing with various crops in the United States alone.

“Pioneer will be adding 400 (career) positions nationwide,” Curran said. “We just added one here in the last two months.”

Unlike many internships, there’s money attached to these. Curran said intern stipends are “competitive,” compared to pay for other professionals working at the research center.

“And this year we offered a signing bonus to attract more interns,” he added. “The pool of kids for ag education is shrinking, so we adjust our internship to make them attractive.”

The internships allow college sophomores, juniors and seniors to experience both research and the agricultural industry first-hand. “Our expectation is that they learn something while they are here, and not just about how companies operate but about biology, production, practice and science in general,” Curran explained.

Pioneer is a broad-based plant genetics company headquartered in Johnston, Iowa. The Weld County site, Curran said, uses traditional breeding to develop new corn products adapted to local conditions. There’s also a large testing program in both silage and grain.

“We look at the adaptability of corn hybrids from other parts of the country,” he said. “We are primarily focused on drought research and we also work on specific diseases common to the high plains.”

Two internship options

It is within that fertile structure that the internships are grown. Each year, the program offers four to six students majoring in agronomy, plant sciences, biology or any agricultural education field two professional internship options. The molecular breeding interns deal specifically with understanding the application of breeding technology. “This internship is more upstream in terms of product development in earlier periods of testing,” Curran said.

The Product Advancement Trials interns, on the other hand, work with farmers on a test plot that the farmers have planted to determine which new products are the best for their use. “PAT is near the commercial phase and takes possession of the information that comes out of the molecular breeding tests,” according to Curran.

Both are full-time positions requiring interns to work onsite for either three or six months, depending on the assignment.

“PAT interns are assigned a project, and we give them ideas like a survey of a disease, application of tillage to a disease, or increased productivity through density. They collect the data and then formulate a report. We define the role and they get to be creative,” Curran explained.

As an example, last year a PAT intern focused on the effect of plant density on silage yield and quality. “He looked at all those components, assessed and explained differences, and then provided that in a presentation form,” Curran said. “We had an idea what it would tell us but not the specifics, like product performance differences and the effects of plant density on yield and quality, and the potential knowledge around crop water use.”

Pioneer’s goal, he added, is to improve productivity of farms in the high plains, specifically in Colorado. “To do that, we need to have a thorough understanding of the relationship between our products and the management strategies that farmers apply, and our interns play a key role in making that happen.”

The internship program has been in place “for years,” Curran said, and is also available throughout the 27 Pioneer corn research centers in the United States. Recruiting efforts focus on land grant universities such as Colorado State University, Iowa State, Kansas State, South Dakota State and Texas A&M.

“The beauty of this program is that if we have a good pool of candidates, we can send overflow to other centers,” he said. “It’s a big network of people looking for qualified candidates.”

Foot in the door

Interns enjoy a professional rank in the operation and are taken to the Iowa headquarters to do their final presentation. “They spend two to three days going to meetings with corn researchers and then they present,” he said.

The benefits to the students are great, according to Curran, and CSU soil and crop sciences student Jamie Sauer agreed. “It gets your foot in the door,” she said. “You get to know people and about the industry. You make a lot of contacts.”

Sauer finished a six-month molecular breeding internship last summer and starts her second, as a PAT intern, for three months in May.

“I have more experience working with the breeders, and also giving little talks in the field,” she said. “You learn things you might not have known before. It pulls a lot of the concepts from the texts together.”

Sauers plans to stay in research after graduation in December. She will also be bringing her knowledge home to Otis, Colo., for practical application. “I eventually want to move home and start farming for my dad,” she said.

As the students benefit, so does Pioneer, Curran said. “We get another set of eyes where we need specific assistance. They help with data management, data quality and we understand product performance better because they can identify problems like weather and other biological effects. Then we can go out and assess the products,” he added.

The future for breeding better plants – and training more researchers to do it – holds even more possibilities. “The interest in ethanol has encouraged corn acres to go up by at least 10 percent,” Curran said. “So, ultimately we will have interns that are involved in ethanol-type projects.”