Another Semester Underway

School is well underway this semester! As a sophomore, I have cleaned up most of my general education classes now and am taking more classes geared on what agronomy is about. This semester I am taking a soil fertility class which dives into the chemistry behind soil and how nutrients move within soil and what they do in plants. In the soil fertility lab we are learning about the different processes that soil testing labs perform when they test soils for pH, phosphorous, OM, etc. This has given me a general idea of the time that a proper soil test takes and what a lab has to do. Another class that is very practical to me is my agribusiness management class. In this class we broadly cover economics and then dive into farm accounting. The professor’s goal in this course is not necessarily to teach us how to organize financial statements, but to be able to read them and effectively evaluate them for the business when making decisions. Two other notable classes that continue to educate me are the soils and crops judging teams. On the soils team, you continually learn how to classify soil and you have the opportunity to learn about and see soils in other states. On the crops team, we are prepping for the NACTA competition which covers almost anything you can think of in Agronomy from soil fertility, Live plant and seed identification, lab equipment, farm machinery, sprayer calculations, general agronomy math, and even an agronomy exam where they can ask any sort of agronomy question. This is my semester here at Purdue and it’s a great place to be!