Building from excellent agents to effective organizers of collaborative, sustainable rural enterprise

Rural America has moved from occasional crises to recurrent crises to chronic crisis. Policy and education programs of the past were successful in achieving production goals. The dynamic, polarized complexity of today's chronic crisis requires additional skills. Naturally individualistic farmers have been encouraged to see their problems as arising from environmentalists and competition from other farmers. As one farmer puts it:

"Farmers have looked over the fence at their neighbors and thought that there was the competition. We had it all wrong. Our competition is in an office on Wall Street or Memphis. He is motivated by the bottom line only and what he can return to his shareholders. He gives not a thought to rural America and our way of life here. We must realize before its too late that our neighbors, farmers and small town dwellers, are not our competition but our allies."

The trend in agriculture today is toward vertical integration with control by huge corporations out of the hands of farmers. For example, January 2002 data show Tyson now "controls about 28 percent of the nation's beef market, 23 percent of the market for chickens and 18 percent of the pork market" (Mercer, 2002). The control of agriculture by large corporations is supported by the research of Keith Collins, Chief Economist of USDA ( 2001) and Bill Heffernan (2000). The low commodity prices provided by these corporations are forcing the greatest crisis ever seen in American agriculture requiring government payments at levels increasingly onerous to the tax-paying public.
In some parts of the country, particularly the Midwest, a new approach to organizing farmers has resulted in a new generation of farmer-owned businesses which has helped some farmers maintain profitability in the face of some of the lowest commodity prices ever seen.
Organized groups are the source of change. The observation of Margaret Mead-- "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world;
indeed, it is the only thing that ever has"--was tested and proven true by county-level agents in the 1930s. These agents helped establish farmer cooperatives across the U.S. and Northern Europe, creating a huge impact on economic systems. The impact of organized farmer groups on ecological systems was first seen on a national scale in the 1980s in Australia. Beginning with a systems agriculture/facilitation training program at one agricultural college (Hawkesbury), natural resource systems facilitation training has spread to nearly all universities in Australia (Bawden, 1995). This type of facilitation training has not been institutionalized in U.S. universities, largely because organizing/facilitation in the U.S. since its heyday in the 30s become split into at least three competing disciplines: community development, Alinsky-type organizing, and corporate facilitation [see our website for further discussion (http://www.deltanetwork.org/skills/organize.htm).
Recently in the U.S. a new synthesis of these approaches has arisen, leading to a rapid increase in the number of farmer-owned value added ventures in the past decade. According to figures released by Iowa State University, there has been an exponential increase in producer-owned new-generation cooperatives (NGCs), with the number of new ventures at least doubling every year since 1990. However, nearly all these startups have been outside the South (Merritt, et al., 2001).
Those most familiar with this burgeoning phenomena explain this curve and the lack of activity in the South with the statement: "behind every successful cooperative is a good facilitator." Bill Patrie (1995), who has worked with more successful NGCs than any other person in the country, contends: "The greatest need in agriculture today is for good business facilitators." Many (whether in Extension or other organizations) have the technical expertise and, often, personal networks to help farmers develop "natural value chains". In the Upper Midwest, an informal network of such facilitators, led by Extension, has recently emerged (Holmes, 2001). Nearly every Midwestern state has an informal state network of agents who facilitate new enterprises. Three (Missouri, Nebraska and Michigan) have developed formal networks. The challenge for all states is to improve the skills of agents performing enterprise facilitation.
Value-chains. This initiative is based on the concept of maintaining the values of sustainable family farms through the value chain of food and fiber products. The value chain concept (Porter, 1985) disaggregates a firm into its strategically important activities to understand the behavior of the firm's costs and the firm's existing or potential sources of differentiation. A firm gains competitive advantage by performing these strategically important activities at a lower cost or better than its competitors. Dakota Pasta Growers Cooperative, for example, has established a value chain from its wheat farmer owners to health- and environment-conscious consumers. Many Southern agents (whether in Extension or other organizations) have the technical expertise and, often, personal networks to help farmers develop "natural value chains."
Extension has the staff in place to facilitate collaborative farmer efforts. Although U.S. Extension is admired worldwide for its successes in increasing production of commodities, less emphasis has been directed in recent years to organizing farmers for marketing and processing their production.
When extension was being established, organizing farmers was often the first job of the extension agent. In the early years after the Extension Service was created in 1914, before extension staff could bring the service's education programs to a county, the service was required to establish a farm organization composed of 20% of farmers in the county (CAFB, 2000).
A state extension administrator stated the importance of organizing to extension in 1916:
"It is recognized that the county agent must be able to do more than give out technical information. He must be a leader and organizer in order that people may be brought together and enlisted in an active way in the various movements . . ." A revitalized cooperative extension service, operating once again as a catalyst for organizing land-grant staff and rural people, could be an exciting and tremendously valuable tool for addressing an array of complex problems and opportunities. Extension could once again be the exciting place to work in agriculture–on the cutting edge of the needed transformation of American agriculture.
Methods of rural organizing. Classic facilitation, classic organizing, community development, rural entrepreneurial training all seek to help organize collaborative groups of people in rural areas. Each has much to offer; each has limitations. Classic organizing has been very successful in civil rights, labor and some environmental organizing. Community development efforts have been successful at gaining participation from whole communities. Classic facilitation efforts have been successful at conflict resolution and consensus-building. None of these three have been successful in enterprise creation. Entrepreneurial training has been successful at team-building for specific enterprises, but often the resulting enterprises have been detrimental to environmental and community values (Hendricksen & Heffernan, 2000).
The limitations of the various approaches has resulted in many attempts to synthesis an approach combining the most effective techniques from each. For example, rules for "new generation organizing" (Patrie, 1998) have been developed to replace Saul Alinsky's rules of organizing (Alinsky, 1969). A review of literature shows no synthesis of all four approaches.
In practice, the most successful organizers and facilitators draw from all these approaches and create their own unique approaches to match their personalities, places and times. What has been in short supply is the combination of expertise in ecologically-sound agricultural systems and openness to various methods of learning, organizing and facilitating.
A few individuals in agricultural research and extension have promoted facilitation techniques and/or been effective in organizing value-added enterprises. What's needed, however, is a high profile effort which places organizing collective action at the top of the agenda of major institutions and agents in the field. Such an initiative will provide an organizing principle which could unite sustainable agriculture, value-added efforts, community development and entrepreneurial training programs.
The missing link in developing alternative markets: team facilitation/organizing. Southern SARE, eight years ago, funded the "State of the South" project which conducted an assessment of research and education needs. The conclusion of a survey of Extension, NRCS and NGO staff in nearly 1200 Southern counties revealed that agents in every state ranked establishment of new marketing alternatives as the number one priority for both research and education in every state (Huston and Rhoades, 1995). Southern SARE has followed up on this conclusion by funding projects aimed at assisting farmers in alternative marketing and value-added diversification. In one project, agents were asked about their interest in training to help farmers establish value-added businesses. Of 91 agents surveyed at the project's Dyersburg, Tennessee, conference, 100% were interested in training in entrepreneurial agriculture.
Another recent SARE funded project resulted in entrepreneurial training for agents in Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee. Tim Woods, the University of Kentucky co-investigator, said the project was very helpful, but was missing one key component which he and other ag economists and rural sociologists are not well-versed in. The area Woods and many other feel is neglected is the focus of this project: group dynamics, team-building and other skills needed in developing new collaborative organizations.
Uniting social psychology and agricultural science. Many agricultural professionals seem to agree with the Tennessee agent at a Dyersburg workshop who decried psychology research as "studying rats running around in mazes." Agents have focused on production, while the large corporations have used social psychological techniques to help them control that production. If we want to help small and limited resource farms survive, we need to have the same social psychological skills routinely taught to the MBAs now running large agribusinesses.
Partially supported by a SARE PDP grant and the Consortium for Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, a list-serv of 14 successful agent-facilitators spent two years reaching consensus on the areas of social psychology most needed to help rural agents become adept at organizing CSREs. Six areas were identified in this process: I. Learning Systems and Systems Learning, II. Motivating Teams, III. Conceptual Pluralism, IV. Communication Beyond Words, V. Evoking Integration and Innovation and IV. Holistic Decision-Making. Vast amounts of research has been done on the relevance of skills in all these areas to facilitation/organizing. Much of this has been summarized on the website www.deltanetwork.org. What has not been done is systematic research on the relative importance of each of these areas to helping agents become better organizers of CSRE. The purpose of this planning grant proposal is to discover those methods and turn that research into a training program.
Southern SARE recently awarded a planning grant to our institutions (Kentucky State University, University of Arkansas-Pine Bluff, University of Tennessee, and Delta Land and Community) to design a project to help Extension agents and other agents become more adept at facilitating new enterprises. The planning grant supported a series of meetings, workshops, and interviews in five states.
Expert systems for developing good Extension agents. Every state extension service has an extensive plan for training and mentoring based on the long experience of extension leadership in that state. Kentucky's approach (Absher, 2000) is included here to show how facilitation and organizing is a natural outgrowth of existing extension activities.. As the accompanying diagram shows, this model can be represented as a wheel with six spokes: Service, Council, Accountability, Education, Leadership and Collaboration, which are developed in roughly that order, though by no means in lock-step fashion.
At the center, axis or axle of this is the good agent's high levels of integrity and self-confidence. Based on those character traits, the agent becomes adept at answering the questions which are addressed to his office (service spoke). A second spoke to develop is the agent's council/counsel. The agent must find a group of advisors to become his local extension council and to serve as counsel as he seeks to become a better agent. This council/counsel is later complemented by development of independent leadership for improvement of agricultural systems in his county. The third spoke is accountability. Agents must see themselves as accountable for their extension programs. Later, this spoke is complemented by a collaboration spoke when the agent becomes more a collaborator with county residents to improve agricultural systems, rather than as the personally accountable source of improvement. The service spoke is complemented by an education spoke.
Each spoke of the wheel must be in balance or the county extension system runs rough. A smoothly running extension wheel, in this model, becomes a facilitator and organizer of sustainable, resilient and continuously improving agricultural systems.
The Kentucky Legislature in the 2000 session assigned Extension the task of facilitating new agricultural marketing and value-added opportunities in each of Kentucky's 120 counties. Other Southern states may not have as explicit a legislative directive, but many have implicit legislative encouragement and even more have an independent desire to assist farmers in establishing alternative agricultural marketing and processing ventures.
The potential effect of Extension agents throughout the South is hard to underestimate. According to the Area Extension Director in Western Kentucky: "If we do this right, we'll have hundreds of new enterprises in Western Kentucky alone" (Prince, 2001).
Preliminary results. As part of our planning process, we conducted two focus groups with Southern Extension agents to solicit their opinions regarding constraints on the progress of Extension agents toward being successful organizers of collaborative rural enterprises. These results were used to design our approach and activities. We elicited both constraints, interventions and expected results from focus group participants. These were organized by participants into the following chart.

Some agents have successfully overcome these constraints. Case studies of their successes may be valuable. Case studies have been validated at the starting point for understanding complex phenomena such as LOVA facilitation. In recent years case studies have been widely used for classroom instruction to help students relate to a real life situation that required a justifiable solution. Since 1997 the Review of Agricultural Economics has published case studies as a core component of the journal–a lead many other agricultural journals are following. The Harvard Business School Executive Business Program has effectively used case studies to train thousands of management executives. The Harvard Business School program has been successful as a result of teaching faculty proactively developing outreach programs that are of use to business managers.
Extension education efforts have typically not used formal case study materials. Many Extension educators use case studies for their programming, but many of these case studies are never captured on paper as they are disseminated via word of mouth. Learners best relate to real-life situations, and agents tend to listen to others who have previously ventured into new areas. The case studies which have been employed in understanding community development have taken the standard sociological emphasis on effects of community and social factors, not on the influence of individual facilitators and the learning experiences leading to their possession of the skills crucial to assisting in creation of collaborative enterprise.