Mick Ashley
production technician,
Terra Industries

For 20 years, Mick Ashley owned a farm in northwest Iowa, raising corn, soybeans, hogs and cattle. But the farm crisis in the 1980s forced him to sell out.

To help his family get by financially, he took a job in 1983 at Terra Chemicals International (now Terra Industries), working as a part-time operator at a nitrogen fertilizer manufacturing facility. He filled his schedule by selling fertilizer and seed to local farmers.

He was offered a full-time production technician job in 1984, and over the past 18 years has progressed to Terra’s highest level of production technician (Level V).

Elevating himself as a manufacturing worker has required Ashley to gain a comprehensive understanding of the facility’s inner workings, including the intricacies of a nitric acid plant, a urea ammonium plant and two urea plants.

A typical 12-hour shift (7 p.m. to 7 a.m.) finds him monitoring a high-tech control board or working one of the plants, checking for excessive heat and vibration, reading gauges, and preparing equipment for repair by the maintenance crew.

This article appeared in the December 2002/January 2003 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright, 2003.

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