CCD Summer Fellows
As the school year approaches, we are bidding farewell and good luck to our 2025 Summer Fellows Lexi Gardner and Meghan Planck. We're so proud of the work they put in and what they accomplished.
Meghan Planck
Meghan Planck is a marketing and psychology double major passionate about consumer psychology, narrative marketing, content strategy, and social media. An outgoing and creative individual, she loves designing content and campaigns that connect with people through storytelling. Over the summer, Meghan contributed to a variety of CCD projects, including writing newsletter articles on narrative marketing and social media strategies, conducting background research for publications, developing a presentation, and creating social media campaigns like Crop Talk Tuesday to highlight diverse specialty crops and engage the community. She also prepared pre- and post-event summaries, added photos to the photo library, and created social media posts for the field days she attended.
She participated in three farm field days: the OAKS Field Day in Lexington, KY, at Zach Selby’s Dreamtime Gardens; the Hazelfield Cut Flower Field Day in Wheatley, KY; and the Blossom Hill Flower Farm Field Day in Greensville, KY, where she also delivered a presentation titled “23 Actionable Social Media Marketing Tips.”
Lexi Gardner
Lexi has been pursing a minor in business and has been awarded the Blue Grass Spirt scholarship throughout the last 3 years. Lexi plans to stay in Kentucky and purse the grain industry. Each week Lexi travelled to the Lexington farmers market and gathered the prices from a select list of commodities. Lexi then took those prices and transferred them to a document for the CCD website. Lexi took all auction prices from January of this year to August of this year for both Fairview county and Lincoln County.
Lexi also travelled to Owenton county for a farm visit for a cut flower field day. Lexi also wrote multiple articles pertaining the price changes in three different commodities, what the differnet vendors are going through economically and how they price. Lastly Lexi presented to a group of people with Brett Wolff about how the CCD website impacts and is used by people.
Special thanks to the Kentucky Horticulture Council for supporting Lexi's fellowship through their student research grant program.