David Zelaya of Honduras learned a great deal during an internship in Ohio arranged through the CFAES Ohio International Intern Program (TOP). The goal of the program is to assist farmers with finding young people interested in international issues and agricultural experiences. The program does this by matching young people seeking training in crop and animal production with US-based businesses.
Tom Hamilton (a graduate of OSU), who farms near Wilmington, OH, has been an eager recipient of TOP interns for the past 30+ years. He provides interns with housing, transportation and on the job training. Often, the training helps interns become more competitive in pursuing graduate studies. The training David did on Tom’s farm was so successful that David received fellowship funding to attend graduate school at Ohio State University Department of Horticulture and Crop Sciences (HCS). TOP, a self-sustaining unit, provides one or two fellowships per year to its exceptional interns through a competitive process. David used these funds to pursue a master’s degree under the guidance of HCS Prof. Laura Lindsey, optimizing the timing of insecticide applications in soybean production. David graduated with an MS in May 2024 and is now a research associate in HCS with Dr. Tyler Carr (turfgrass). For David’s MS experiments, he again visited Tom’s farm, completing the full circle that took him from internship training to research based graduate studies, and on the farm research. There he periodically ran into a fellow Latin American, Luis Gustavo Tosi Costa of Brazil, who won the TOP Your Internship, Your Story internship in 2019 when he interned with TOP at Battlefield Farms in Virginia. The Ohio International Intern Program (TOP) is Ohio-based, but it places people from around the world in internships across the US and in several countries.
Recent interns trained by Dr. Lindsey and Tom Hamilton funded by a TOP Fellowship include Lucas Dias Mendonça of Brazil, who started his MS in January 2024. TOP arranges for the collaboration of experienced producers, professors and young scientists honing the skills needed for their field’s future needs. This unique program has helped extend matching funding from Ohio Soybean producers to enhance this cooperation and is helping improve soybean production in Ohio. It fulfills a need to fund graduate research in areas of special interest to Ohio growers.
Mendonça notes: The first time I heard of the program was through a friend that had already done his internship with TOP. So, I went to do the application process and fortunately Tom Hamilton took me as an intern for the year of 2022 in Wilmington, Ohio. It was a great experience that provided me with practical knowledge regarding soybean and corn production in Ohio.