Pennsylvania native builds on dairy foundation with Northwest education

Pennsylvania native builds on dairy foundation with Northwest education

When Breann Poole was younger, she made a display board about J.C. Penney and his famous Guernsey cattle herd. She didn't know it at the time, but the project would eventually lead her more than 1,000 miles from her family's dairy farms in Pennsylvania to Northwest Missouri State University.

A senior animal science and agricultural business major from Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, Poole is preparing to graduate in December with plans to return to her home state and become part of her family's dairy operation.

Her time at Northwest and a summer internship in agricultural lending have broadened her vision of what that future could look like.

Research project pointed her to Northwest

Growing up around dairy farming, Poole developed a particular passion for Guernsey cattle and became heavily involved in the American Guernsey Association. Through one of their youth events, she learned about J.C. Penney, the businessman who founded J.C. Penney department stores and purchased Emmadine Farm in New York during the early 1920s.

Penney began breeding high-quality Guernsey cattle there, developing what became known as the Foremost line. The herd earned numerous grand championships and helped elevate the standard of the breed.

Decades later, in 2020, a cooperative partnership between the University of Missouri's College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources and Northwest's School of Agricultural Sciences brought 30 head of the historic Guernsey herd to Northwest's R.T. Wright Farm.

Poole learned of Northwest while researching the herd for her display. Years later, when it was time to start looking at colleges, she remembered and toured Northwest as a senior in high school.

She found the University had everything she was looking for in her degree. The rural location, farm and financial assistance were all factors that contributed to her decision to attend.

Connections lead to internship, scholarship

At Northwest, Poole is active in the School of Agricultural Sciences and works at Northwest's dairy farm. She said the relationships she's built with faculty and students have been among the highlights of her college experience.

"The school of agriculture in general has been a really great place to be," Poole said. "All the professors are so nice, open and kind, and I always talk to them. That's been really great, and I've made a lot of good friends."

Poole's agriculture connections helped her secure an internship this summer with Horizon Farm Credit, an agricultural lending company headquartered in Pennsylvania. She worked on projects involving market intelligence, shadowing, lending case studies and credit analysis, gaining experience in an area of agriculture she had not previously considered as a career path.

"I got a lot of agricultural lending experience that I really liked," Poole said. "I just want to be able to give back to the agriculture industry. I think agricultural finance is a really good place for that because it's really helping farmers get the resources they need to build the legacies of their family farms."

Last year, Poole also participated in the Value-Added Agriculture program at Northwest, where she connected with industry professionals and visited agricultural operations. She applied skills from that experience to her internship at Horizon.

"I learned a lot as far as going to different operations and asking questions, because we did a lot of tours, and we went to a lot of different places," Poole said. "So then, when I was out on farm tours or farm visits with the loan officers that I shadowed, I feel like I was a little more prepared, a little more able to ask questions and able to really analyze the operations, because I had that Value-Added Agriculture experience last year."

Recently, her connection to the dairy industry was further recognized with a $3,000 scholarship from the Dairy Excellence Foundation of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Dairymen's Association for the 2026-27 academic year. The scholarship supports students pursuing dairy-related majors and careers.

For Poole, the scholarship carries a special meaning because of her family's longstanding connection to the organization supporting Pennsylvania's dairy farmers.

"It's an organization that my family works closely with," Poole said. "We've gotten grants through them, so it's been pretty good to work with them on some things with our family farm - and then to be able to get the scholarship, I was glad to be recognized as someone that's into the dairy industry and wants to go back into it after graduation."