American agriculture without Cooperative Extension?
WASHINGTON, May 4, 2016 - The story is familiar: There’s
less and less state and county funding to keep cooperative extension programs
around. But now, with states across the country struggling to pass budget
deals, the stakes are higher than ever before.
In Connecticut, the current fiscal year budget deficit is
$256 million and the state’s projected deficit for fiscal 2016-17 is hovering
around $1 billion. Connecticut’s legislature has yet to balance the budget and
the clock is ticking – June 30 marks the expiration of the current budget.
Henry Talmage, executive director of the Connecticut Farm Bureau, told Agri-Pulse that there have been cuts to
extension in the past, and more are on their way.
“The first thing that will go is open (extension) positions…
They won’t be filled,” he said. The extension offices will be told “to do more
with less,” and perhaps, if the state budget cuts are substantial, there could
be layoffs, he said.
“You can’t go less than one (employee),” Talmage
added. “Then you don’t have a program.” That’s a central struggle for extension
programs, he said – they’re small to begin with. Once they lose critical mass,
they’re gone.
In Connecticut, extension
is funded through the University of Connecticut with matching funds from the
state. Most other states receive county funding for extension in addition to
university funds and state dollars, but not Connecticut – the state dissolved
county governments in 1960. This setup can be pretty limiting, Talmage said,
particularly when the state can’t pass or balance a budget.
Gregory Weidemann, the dean of the College of Agriculture at
the University of Connecticut, said
the cuts – although not finalized – will likely prevent him from filling
“critical vacancies.”
“The stories
aren’t pretty,” he said. “Every year we have to make cuts.”
It’s possible – with
the right messaging and enough political might – to escape some budget cuts,
says Mark O’Neill, media and strategic communications director for the Pennsylvania
Farm Bureau.
When Pennsylvania’s
budget impasse in March threatened to shut down Pennsylvania State University’s
extension program, O’Neill says extension advocates stepped up and reached out
to explain how the program benefits farmers and non-farmers alike.
“Extension (research
and technical support) always plays a role, every year, all over the place,” he
said. Of course local farming is extension supported, but that economic
activity bolsters regional economies, he said. Extension research also covers
areas of food safety and pest management, which benefit suburban and urban
communities, in addition to rural folk.
Increasing the
relevance of extension services in the eyes of suburban and urban populations
is difficult, especially when outreach budgets are constrained, so extension
offices have had to get creative when it comes to communicating their value.
Chris Watkins, director of Cornell University’s cooperative extension, says his program
has been exploring how it can utilize smartphones as a way to communicate with
clients. It has also stretched its budget by regionalizing services that were
once provided on a county-by-county basis, like expert consultations with
veterinarians or agronomists.
Spreading resources in
this way allows extension to continue offering the services of top-level
experts to landowners, which Watkins says “can be more powerful in terms of
meeting the needs of the farmer” compared to generalists, or a Google search.
“We just went through
the 100-year anniversary of extension in the U.S.,” he continued. “If we want
it to exist 100 years from now… it’s going to look a lot different.”
But that doesn’t mean
extension won’t continue to emphasize hands-on, experiential learning, he said.
One of the hallmarks of extension – face-to-face engagement – is also “a fundamental
human need,” Watkins said. “It’s really hard to believe that the future is a
place where people don’t learn the most” through that approach.
It’s also hard to
imagine American ag without extension.
A recently released
Penn State study, authored by Stephan Goetz, a professor
of agricultural and regional economics, says that without extension, America
would have lost four farmers for every one that left the sector over the last
25 years. That means 137,000 fewer farmers left farming because of extension
services.
“If we were to loosely
extrapolate this, I would say that extension over its existence has saved over
a million farmers – that’s a big number considering we only have 2 million or
so left now,” Goetz said in an interview with USDA.
Talmage said that
Connecticut has 1,000 more farmers now than recorded in the last USDA Ag
Census, taken in 2012. These beginning farmers “are going
to need a lot of hand holding,” and extension programs fill that need, he said.
#30
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