Grow With Us: Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch’s Summer Internship Program is a paid, 12-week opportunity that provides a 100% real-world experience for students early in their career who are considering working in the agricultural field. Throughout the summer, you will apply academic learning to real-world situations and cultivate project management, problem-solving, and communication skills. And with service-learning opportunities, community outings, field experience, and professional development lunch-and-learns, you’ll grow with more than 1,100 team members to care for our 10 million hens who annually provide nearly 3 billion delicious, nutritious eggs that are responsibly and ethically produced.

Your Role: As a Pullet and Production Intern, you will partner with members of our Flock Service, Manure, Maintenance and Service Crew to develop an advanced understanding of one of Herbruck’s pullet and layer sites and how it operates within Herbruck’s 10 locations throughout Michigan, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Your responsibilities will encompass analyzing production input and output information, developing detailed project scopes, spearheading project kick-offs, curating and updating project timelines, streamlining farm site organization, inspecting for continuous improvement, championing on-site safety and compliance, and overseeing the completion of project close-out and reporting.

You will support Project Management:

• Contribute to the production team to ensure they achieve projects schedules, budgets, and production goals.
• Manage an incremental improvement project in a timely and accurate manner, monitoring overall projects progress according to the project scope and available resources. Participate in estimating the time, resources, and personnel to complete a project.
• After analyzing production input and output data, create project work scope with the Production Farm Manager, creating and maintaining overall project schedule and timeline. Participate in project kick-off and execute project work plan. Monitor and alert the project team when changes occur in the project scope and update schedules promptly.
• Alert Production Farm Manager if you become aware of changes that could affect the project scope, schedule, or work completion. Help coordinate and schedule any compliance or safety audits during project.
• Perform other related duties as assigned.

You will Problem-Solve:

• Ensure an organized farm throughout the project. Help coordinate and supervise production activities. Create and maintain daily reports of production activities.
• Review farm conditions and any effect they may have on other disciplines (including construction, maintenance, manure, flock service, compliance, and service crew).
• Prepare, schedule, and report on project close-out.

You’ll Communicate and Network:

• Collaborate with various disciplines throughout Herbruck’s. Regularly communicate with Pullet and Production Managers, Supervisors, Compliance, and Bird Crew to create, update, and understand any changes to project design, scope, schedule, and budget.
• Promote safety, encourage safe work practices, and rectify site hazards immediately. Support safety and compliance training, addressing safety audit findings and helping to create and update compliance training in Herbruck’s University.
• Attend daily supervisor stand up meetings, compiling and communicating action items from various parts of the farm.
• Assist the Pull and Production Manager with other communication including project photography and documentation, data collection and analysis, and office administrative work.
• Understand what the deliverable needs to be to meet project needs and what it takes to make projects successful and communicate this to Herbruck’s leadership at the close of your summer.

Your Qualifications:

• Your Education: You’re enrolled in a program related to agriculture such as Animal Science, Poultry Science, Poultry Management, of Agribusiness.
• Your Experience: Ideally, you’ve worked in an agricultural environment previously, whether a small family farm or a more sophisticated operation. Otherwise, work experience dealing with animals, people, or machinery can prepare you well for Herbruck’s. Please note that due to biosecurity regulations, you cannot own or have contact with birds or swine while interning with Herbruck’s.
• Your Technical Skills: Ideally, you have some mechanical aptitude and maintenance experience.
• Your Competencies:
  • Action-Oriented: You take on new opportunities and tough challenges with a sense of urgency, high energy, and enthusiasm
  • Communicate Effectively: You develop and deliver multi-mode communications that convey a clear understanding of the unique needs of difference audiences
  • Nimble Learning: You actively experiment when tackling new problems, using both successes and failures as learning fodder
  • Resourcefulness: You secure and deploy resources effectively and efficiently
  • Self-development: You actively seek new ways to grow and be challenged using both formal and informal development channels.