USDA Supports Terrorists?

What can you call beings who decapitate other beings but terrorists?

Maybe you call them "decapitating flies", and distribute them in Alabama because they decapitate fire ants? All part of the service provided by your Department of Agriculture and the Extension Service.

Networks and Agricultural Economics

This is a Politico article from a while back, describing the competition between agricultural economists at different universities for the 3 million dollars to pay for helping farmers understand their options under the farm bill.

Call me old-fashioned, call me stick-in-the mud, but isn't helping farmers understand the world the whole raison d'etre of the extension service? 

Anyhow, David Rogers tells a good story of how government works, particularly the linkages among Congress, the bureaucracy and the private/nonprofit/educational world.

Extension and Obamacare

Here's a Rural Blog post about new laws in Georgia, which doesn't want its citizens enrolling in Medicaid.  Extension seems to be facing some political flak there.

4-H and the Economist

Interesting article praising 4-H in The Economist, implying that it, extension, and land-grant u's account for the differences between US and European agriculture. 

I think not, actually--they contribute but don't "account".

Slow Ideas and Extension

That's the title of an article in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande--he considers the differeences between good ideas which spread fast (like anesthesia) and those which spread slowly (like aseptic methods).  He uses the distinction in discussing a project to change the way Indian medical personnel handle newborn babies in one state.  He cites the persistence of drug company salesmen, who visit doctors again and again, trying to set up a relationship of trust in order to persuade them to use a new drug.  In his project, their representative visits a local hospital again and again, before finally getting the nurses to change their methods.

Gawande makes a reference to the role of agricultural extension in teaching farmers new methods in the 20th century.  I did my first tweet (@facelessbureaucrat) to point out to him that Seaman Knapp, the father of extension, believed teaching was not the key; having a local farmer demonstrate the methods on his own farm was much more effective.  I doubt I'll do much on Twitter, though it might be an outlet for my nitpicking, as in the one to Gawande.

I do wonder how much demonstrating extension does these days.

Best Practices, Reinvented

I am reading a biography of Seaman Knapp, sometimes called the father of the extension service.

One of the big problems in agriculture around 1900 was dissemination.  Researchers at the experiment stations and people in the field had identified ways to grow more and better plants and animals, but they couldn't convince farmers to change their habits and adopt new methods.

The description was reminiscent of the "best practices" fad in the 1990's: the idea that business consultants could identify what the best organizations were doing and then inject them into other organizations.

Lots of reasons why the idea doesn't work nearly as well as it ought to.  For one thing, a "best practice" identified by an outsider is likely to oversimplify, to miss some features of the organization's culture which are critical to success.  And importing a "best practice" under the auspices of some high-paid outsider is likely to raise the hackles (does anyone these days know what a "hackle" is) of the people who've been doing the work, in their minds pretty successfully.

[Updated: see this Technology Review post on why Silicon Valley can't be duplicated.]

On Adapting to the Weather on the Farm

We didn't grow corn in my time on the farm, which was long ago anyway, so his content is mostly a mystery to me, but John Phipps has an interesting post outlining 11 steps he and his son are taking to adapt their operation to changes in weather/climate.  I'm not sure they're not preparing to fight the last war; one of the things I think we know is that weather in the future will be as variable as in the past.  To me that means that adjusting farming operations is likely to pay off over the long haul, but not necessarily the short.   (As a side note, I saw somewhere that one place we got additional acreage from is by doublecropping; apparently in southern Illinois and other places it's now possible to follow wheat with short season corn.)

The 11 steps demonstrate clearly how much knowledge the modern farmer needs.  It's just a continuation of a long long trend, a trend which puts the small farmer and the older farmer at a competitive disadvantage.

Extension.org Goes Piggy

The RSS feed at extension.org has been going wild over the past few days; I'd guess 2-300 posts on hogs, mostly in a QandA format.  Here's their answer to the question:

Why have pork production units become larger and the industry become more vertically integrated?

from eXtension by Contributors

Economies of size resulting in higher profits ? through purchasing inputs cheaper and reducing marketing risk (through contractts), more efficient use of resources, greater access to capital, specialization of labor.

The same reasons can be used for the increase in average size of farms for many crops.

What Does Extension Do?

Here's an article on the shift of an extension director over to FSA, which provides some information on what extension actually does, at least in Iowa.

Extension Service in New York City

The Times has an article on an extension specialist who retired in March. Turns out he's the father of urban farming, at least in NYC and at least over the last 35 years:

You have most likely never heard of Mr. Ameroso. Yet from a rubble-strewn vacant lot in Brooklyn where he showed New Yorkers how to grow food in 1976 to a three-acre stretch of Governors Island that he’s helping to sow now, he has been behind nearly every organized attempt to grow and sell food in the city, as well as many of the city’s best-known food organizations.

He was New York City’s first extension agent focused on farming, and now probably its last one. Mr. Ameroso formally retired in March and will spend the 2010 growing season removing himself from the daily work of city farms and making sure his colleagues — many of whom he’s trained — can carry on without him.

Extension started to help farmers improve their farming methods, taking advantage of research at the land-grant institutions.  It expanded to include homemakers, demonstrating canning techniques, teaching nutrition, etc. IMHO it reflects the Progressive impulse to teach and organize, improving things by using reason. Now, as one can see at extension.org  it takes on a much wider scope of problems--aging, caregiving, psychology, management, etc.  As indicated in the Times piece, there was an attempt to extend extension's reach into the city.  While many in the city could have benefited by the advice and information now available, serving urban needs hasn't been a success.  There's the isolated cases as described by the Times, but extension never figured out how to fill urban needs in a way which would cause urban politicians to support appropriations for extension.  It could be a case study in the limitations of organizational flexibility: in the case of extension you could take the extension worker out of the country, but not the country out of the organization.

Master Gardeners in Fairfax

I blogged recently about the Extension Service's Master Gardener program (its blog) and noted its absence from the Reston library.  In fairness I should note other branches of the Fairfax library do have Master Gardeners in attendance.

Master Gardeners and Extension--Musings

In the last couple days the extension.org website has had a number of posts on various aspects of the "Master Gardener" program (also a bunch on swine).  (Briefly, this is a program where Extension trains people in gardener, then they go out and train ordinary, run of the mill gardeners, novices, etc.) See here.

I recently posted on the cuts in extension in Illinois.  I think in a rational world we would probably rethink and redo the structure of the extension service.  Currently it's tied to the land grant colleges, one per state.  Traditionally it had one or more agents in each county, though that's changed over the years.  But in a world of modern communication, is it really rational for each New England state to have its own setup?  I wonder how much duplication one could find in the work of the different colleges.  (I suspect there are efforts at coordination, but my cynicism is strong enough that I doubt the results.)

Transparency in government is good, and reaching out to the grassroots is good, so master gardeners are good. But I wonder.  Part of my wondering is due to the fact that the Reston library used to have master gardeners in attendance on Saturdays, they got some business, but I haven't seen them for a couple years.  I wonder how effective the program has been.

Extension Cuts--What Other Cuts?

From Farmgate

Illinois is the latest state to rework its Extension system. After radical changes in states like Iowa and Minnesota, Illinois will be eliminating 15 regional offices over time and regional educators will shift to county offices. However, 76 county offices will be cut to only 30, with each office serving multiple counties. Staff members will be reduced also, which results from a reduction in state financial support for Extension and 4-H.

I wonder what other areas of infrastructure for agriculture will suffer cuts?  FSA offices, NRCS offices, crop insurance agents?  Does anyone have a census of how many crop insurance agents there are?