Tuesday, June 24, 2014

USDA Website and New Farmers

USDA just unveiled a new website intended to help new farmers.  I've mixed feelings about the USDA home website and the new one, but yet I don't know how you do it, "it" being to develop a website which serves all possible new farmers.  Looking at the USDA site I have a scattering of reactions.

I see USDA has yet to come up with one way to locate all offices which would serve new farmers--they still have one url for NRCS/RD/FSA service centers and a separate one for cooperative extension service.

I don't see any mention of state and local government offices which might be of concern, or government offices outside USDA (i.e., EPA, BLM).

So far, all the links to the website from the USDA home page seem to be time-driven (I'm searching for a word here--they appear in lists of radio news releases, or the slide show of current news, there's no "new farmers'' link.

If I use the search box to search for "new farmer", I get the blog posts, as well as an NAL page, but not the home page for the new farmer website.  The NAL page is also on the first page of Google results for "new farmer".  I wonder if the people heading the new farmer effort ever worked with NAL, or were aware of their effort. 




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