Rural Radio Network Adds Two New Employees

The New Year brought two new staff members to the farm department at KRVN, Jesse Harding (front) and Trey Blomenkamp. They both hit the ground running through producing reports and traveling the coverage area to meetings and conventions.

Jesse is a native of south-central Illinois, where she grew up on a five-acre hobby farm. She was active in 4-H, where her passion for agriculture grew. After high school, she attended Kaskaskia Community College, where she became active in the Post-secondary Agriculture Students (PAS) Organization. She served as a state and national officer in the group. Jesse is a graduate of the University of Illinois where she earned a degree in agricultural communications. During her final summer at the university, she was a farm broadcasting intern with WYXY (Champaign, IL). She gave market reports, produced agricultural news and interviews and attended several events on behalf of the station. After graduation, Jesse accepted a position as Assistant Farm Broadcaster with the Wisconsin Farm Report (Madison, WI) where her duties included doing market reports, including dairy prices, and interviews. She also updated the website and social media sites. Her background and network experience made it a seamless transition to KRVN/Rural Radio Network. Now, she is focusing on agriculture interviews, reports and field work. Also, she does video interviews for their website. Her knowledge of agriculture is diverse, ranging from crops to dairy to cranberries, and now she is learning about Nebraska's agriculture.

Trey is a native of Nebraska and grew up on a farm near Broadwater. He was active in 4-H and is now a senior attending the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK).  He is studying sports administration with a minor in broadcasting. During his time at UNK, he was an audio engineer, which sparked his interest in radio. Prior to being an intern at KRVN, he hosted and co-hosted his own radio shows at UNK. Also, Trey did play-by-play announcing for football, basketball, and baseball games. His main passion is sports broadcasting, but having grown up on a farm means that farm broadcasting is an interest for him, too. Trey's knowledge of agriculture is diverse in crops and cattle. He will graduate after his internship and plans to work in radio doing either sports or farm broadcasting.