Nov 14, 2007
Extension is Losing Money, but it’s not Losing Relevance

The story about Penn State Cooperative Extension on the front page of this magazine is the seventh in a series I’ve been writing for more than a year. It’s also the last profile I’ll write about Extension services in a particular state. This magazine will continue to cover Extension activities from other angles, of course, since those activities are a primary source of information for people who live and breathe agriculture.

But after profiling the state of Extension (as far as it pertains to commercial fruit and vegetable growers) in Michigan, North Carolina, New York, Washington, California and Pennsylvania – and writing a story about federal funding – I’m starting to feel like I’m repeating myself.

The feeling of repetition probably comes from a few general trends that are noticeable to anyone who has bothered to study Extension funding in the last few decades: federal funds are diminishing, universities are scrambling for grant money and there are fewer county agents (now called educators) to go around.

That doesn’t mean Extension is in danger of extinction. Far from it. The system is evolving, perhaps even shrinking, but it’s not dying. Extension’s ability to adapt is part of what makes it, as my colleague Dick Lehnert often says, one of the best ideas the United States has ever come up with.

While preparing for the Extension series last year, I sent an e-mail survey to our subscribers, asking them questions about the system – what they think of it and where they think it’s going. On the whole, the responses were extremely positive. There were a few naysayers, of course, and nobody claimed Extension was perfect. But many people need its services and are concerned about its future.

And some still miss its past. You see, back in the days of yore, county agents would come around and visit farms a couple times a year. Usually, the visits weren’t in response to anything. They were just a regular checkup to gauge the health of the farm.

That rarely happens anymore. Nowadays, educators will only visit a farm to investigate a specific problem – a problem that can’t be diagnosed using cell phones, e-mail, fax machines, the Internet or digital photographs.

It might not be as personal as it used to be, but you know what? It’s a lot more efficient. If an educator can solve a farmer’s problem by looking at a photo attached to an e-mail, he doesn’t need to drive all the way to the farm. He can spend that time solving other farmers’ problems. Such an adaptation is necessary when only a handful of Extension educators are available.

What do I mean by “Extension,” by the way? Brief history lesson: The Smith-Lever Act established the Cooperative Extension System (CES) in 1914, as a partnership between USDA and state land-grant universities. A few years ago, that partnership formed a joint task force to study Extension funding trends. The task force defined CES as the “only comprehensive, national infrastructure in the world that dynamically links individual citizens and communities with their public universities and all levels of government in a mutual and continuous applied learning relationship.”

That’s a fancy way of saying, “Extension connects people.” It connects college professors with homemakers, obscure researchers with everyday farmers, your local county official with a distant federal bureaucrat, and so on. It’s a huge web of people and information – and most people don’t even know it exists. They’d notice if it was gone, though.

Even this writer, who considered himself knowledgeable, didn’t realize he had a source of free information at his fingertips until he became a professional journalist. He called his county Extension office for the first time this spring, trying to figure out how to deal with the ants that were invading his home. They told him what everybody else did: Buy some traps.

In that instance, Extension didn’t tell me anything I didn’t find out from other sources, but it’s nice to have a source that isn’t trying to sell me something.

The traps worked, by the way.




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