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Each week during the 2022 season we’re going through the Eagles’ media guide to find an interesting nugget.
The Eagles’ PR interns do a great job filling out these little oddities in the media guides and they serve as a good way to meet the player behind the helmet.
This week, we chatted with rookie offensive lineman Josh Sills, whose first job was on a farm: “I worked with my high school agriculture teacher on his farm. I planted corn, fed cows, vaccinated cows, artificially inseminated cows. Normal everyday farm stuff.”
Me: What was that experience like?
Sills: I basically did my internship with him. We just normal farm stuff, built a fence, vaccinated cattle, planted corn, mowed hay, baled hay. That was really about it. I knew him. He actually went to school with my mom’s brother, my uncle, so I knew him a little bit before then and just became really good friends with him. I asked him if he would be comfortable with me doing an internship with him. Of course he said yes. I did my internship with him over the summer, so it was probably a couple months.
Me: Was it like summer before senior year?
Sills: Yeah, so it was either the summer of 2019 before I graduated or it was that spring/summer going into that fall. I don’t know exactly when.
Me: Did you grow up around a lot of farm land?
Sills: I did, yeah. Where I’m from, Southeast Ohio, rural Ohio, farm country. Pretty much everybody were I live has a farm or owns a farm. Maybe they don’t have animals but they have a decent amount of land that could be considered a farm.
Me: Was there any aspect of that stuff that you particularly enjoyed?
Sills: Ummm. I don’t know if there was one thing that I particularly enjoyed doing. I enjoyed doing all of it. I’ve always been an outdoors person. I’ve always loved being outside and being hands on as far as my job. My degree is in agriculture. I’ve grown up around agriculture. I don’t want to be in an office. I like to be active, one of those things.
Me: That makes sense.
Sills: But I wouldn’t say there was one aspect that I enjoyed more. I learned a lot of stuff and made a lot of great memories.
Me: Is that something after football you’d like to do?
Sills: Absolutely. I’d like to get into farming. I don’t necessarily know which aspect, whether it be crops, livestock or that kind of thing. But definitely something that I’m looking into.
Me: It was a livestock farm you were on?
Sills: Yeah. He did cattle. And then of course raised field corn, combined shelled, all that stuff. Grinded his own feed for the cattle and stuff like that.
Me: I gotta ask you about the one part in here where me, a city boy, looks at and goes, ‘Gosh.’ The artificially inseminating the cows. What’s that like? And is that as daunting a task for you as it would be for me?
Sills: I would say it probably wouldn’t be as daunting. And I would say that because I grew up around that. Where I’m from, that’s a very common occurrence that a lot of people do and they use to get the best genetics possible in their herd of cattle. I would say for someone that’s not used to seeing that or doesn’t know about that, it would be very … a shock to learn how that’s done. But it’s a really cool, in my opinion because I grew up around it, thing and the anatomy behind it is pretty cool too.
Me: That’s pretty interesting. How many cows on the farm?
Sills: Probably around 15 or 20. It was a smaller farm. Wasn’t anything large. He had it for him and his family.
Me: It’s cool to be around people who have had such different experiences. For you, this was just normal.
Sills: Yeah, I look at it like normal everyday life for everyone at home. But there’s definitely a lot of people who wouldn’t look at it like that because they’re not used to it or they didn’t grow up on or they’ve not been around. Some of the things would be different the way I view it.
Me: Do you talk with teammates who have been around it?
Sills: Yeah, I talk to Cam (Jurgens). Being from Nebraska, him and his family have a farm. So I talk to him a bit.
Me: Thank you, man. I appreciate it.
Sills: Yeah, absolutely.
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Eagles Q&A: Josh Sills talks about his cattle farming past – NBC Sports Philadelphia
