Starting "A Growing Passion"

Welcome to "A Growing Passion", a blog where I want to share my ever growing passion for agriculture, leadership, faith, and other things that are having an impact on my life. To be honest, I never thought I would even start my own blog because I thought it would take too much time, and I was too afraid to even manage one. However, that all changed several months ago.

A little under a year ago, I had the opportunity to begin interning with the Nebraska Corn Board. My title was the Communication and Market Development intern. I understood what market development meant, which was helping find new uses for corn and doing research. However, I didn't quite know what the "communication" part of this title meant. I knew it didn't mean answering phone calls all day but thought maybe it dealt more with trade shows or communicating more with Nebraska's 26,000 corn farmers. While those two things were part of the internship experience, I soon found out that the communication part meant I would do a lot of work with social media.

I was familiar with what social media was, I mean I did have a Facebook account, but soon realized that there was much more to social media. There is Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google Plus, Pinterest, and last but not least- the blog. Like I mentioned before,  I had a Facebook account but hadn't even thought about doing any of the other social media stuff. Yet, that all changed as soon as I started at the corn board. All of a sudden I had my own personal twitter account set up (@latwater1) and then started making educational videos to post on the Nebraska Corn Board Youtube page. Lets just say I was learning quite a bit about social media and to be honest, was really getting into it. After about a month being with the corn board, I began to write blogs for the Nebraska Corn Kernels talking about some of the current issues facing both the corn and agriculture industry. After writing a couple of blogs for the Nebraska Corn Kernels, I began to post monthly "Interesting Intern Insights", which featured blogs that had my opinion on certain issues that agriculture faced. For a person that was skeptic about blogging, I suddenly fell in love with it because it gave me the opportunity to share my story about agriculture with others.

As I mentioned earlier, I started with the Nebraska Corn Board just under a year ago and will soon be ending my internship with them come this May. It has truly been a great experience with them and I am thankful for them getting me more involved with social media, which I find myself constantly using. If I am not on Facebook, I am usually on twitter. With my internship coming to end it also meant that my blogging on the Nebraska Corn Kernels would also becoming to an end as well. However, I didn't want to stop sharing my passion for agriculture, and that is why I created "A Growing Passion". I want to continue to share my growing passion for agriculture with others and what better way to do it than start my own blog!

While I hope that you will enjoy reading my posts, I hope that you will also learn something about the agriculture industry. While "A Growing Passion" will have a heavy focus on agriculture, there will also be occasions where I will blog about leadership, faith, and other things that have had an impact on my life. I hope you enjoy the blog and who knows, maybe it will help you grow your passion!