The application for this internship will be available very soon.  Please reach out to the program coordinator Carrie Simon (cns44) if you have questions.

The Lund Fellows Program for Regenerative Agriculture provides Cornell undergraduate students across disciplines with the opportunity to broaden their perspectives and understanding of natural ecosystems and to learn about ecological and social approaches to agricultural systems. 

The Lund Fellows Program provides students opportunities to gain applied experience working on an agroecological farm and contribute to the farm in meaningful and helpful ways, while learning about the process and considerations involved in managing such an enterprise.

We work to spread awareness about the value and mission of agroecological biodynamic, organic, regenerative, and sustainable approaches to farming, strengthen relationships between the university and local farms and provide assistance to small farms that could not otherwise fund summer internships. 

Host farms participating in the Lund Fellows Program were prioritized based on the following values:  

• Explicitly uses agroecological, biodynamic and/or organic farming methods
• Diversified farm (not just certified organic with industrial farming approach)
• Small-scale farm (less than 200 hectares)
• Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) farmers when possible

Internship description

While we don’t yet have a defined list of every task you will perform, you will have a role in practically every aspect of the business. This will include but isn’t limited to vineyard labor (leaf pulling, cluster thinning, trellis work), winemaking (bottling, blending, lots of cleaning,) scouting and sampling other farmers’ vineyards, and even hosting tastings in our tasting space.

Basic Qualifications and Preferred Experience

The qualifications and experience required for this position are frankly minimal; we’re confident that we can teach an intern all the technical skills they’ll need to perform their tasks. What we’re looking for is an intern who is willing to work hard, open to constructive criticism, and capable of being self-directed once they have the requisite knowledge and experience to perform a given task. Most importantly, we’re looking for an intern who is curious about organic viticulture, low-intervention winemaking, and the natural world at large.

Internship schedule 

During the growing season, the most likely schedule will be four, ten-hour days per week, but flexibility is a must; the weather doesn’t always cooperate with our farming plans.

About the farm

Usonia Wine is a (very) small wife-and-husband operation with no other employees. After working for years in restaurants in New York City and San Francisco, we moved to the Finger Lakes in 2018 and bought our vineyard in 2021.
We currently produce roughly 1300 cases per year, of which approximately 20% comes from grapes that we grow and 80% from grapes that we purchase. We live on the vineyard property and also make our wine here.
Our home vineyard is roughly 3.5 acres of Riesling and Cabernet Franc, and we’ll be planting another 2 acres this spring. The majority of our, and any intern’s, time will be spent in the vineyard. We farm organically and with a minimum of machines, which means a great deal of handwork throughout the season. Our goal with our home vineyard, and the Usonia project more broadly, is to hopefully help push the farming and winemaking practices here in the Finger Lakes in a more sustainable direction. To that end, a great deal of our time is also spent working with the growers from whom we purchase fruit to help improve their farming. Winemaking at Usonia is simple and decidedly low-intervention: spontaneous fermentations, low sulfur, and with very few other inputs.

Our address is 6963 NY-89 in Ovid, NY. Transportation to the farm will be required.
Primary Contact: Alex Alvarez-Perez; 716-866-8141, alex@usoniawine.com