Sustainable Agriculture in Northeast Communities: New Roles, New Skills for Agricultural Educators

Sustainable Agriculture in Northeast Communities: New Roles, New Skills for Agricultural Educators

Summary

Summary
The purpose of this two-year project was to provide extension personnel, USDA agency field staff and others with educational programs, resource materials, and ongoing support to help them work with diverse farm and non-farm audiences to become more effective leaders of local community-based agriculture development efforts. Such efforts include addressing local “agricultural illiteracy;” helping farmers and non-farmers work together to address water quality issues; promoting institutional purchases of local farm products; organizing farmers markets or marketing cooperatives; promoting local agritourism; farmer-to-farmer learning networks; improving farmer-neighbor relations; and identifying new marketing opportunities.

This project has had a major impact in changing peoples’ thinking about the kinds of approaches needed to sustain agriculture in the Northeast. The term “agriculture development” was rarely heard at the beginning of this project. It is now one of the hot issues in most county extension offices in New York.

Follow-up telephone surveys show that participants are using the information and understanding they acquired at the trainings to advance their local goals.

Community agriculture development models and strategies are adopted by communities as a result of our workshops, study tours, newsletter or other networking channels. Some examples: Howard County appointed an Agricultural Development Council and Orange and Wayne Counties hired agricultural development specialist based on models presented in our workshops; extension agents in St. Lawrence and Franklin Counties began a farmer recruitment program based on workshop models. Dutchess County has documented a 45 percent increase in direct marketing sales over the last several years due to the innovative agriculture development efforts of Cooperative Extension and other partners.

Objectives
The major educational objectives were to provide Cooperative Extension, USDA agency field staff, and other “multipliers” with resource materials, training, and assistance in:
1. Organizing and facilitating community-level dialogue and, where needed, mediating conflicts about agricultural issues among people with diverse perspectives and interests in the community.
2. Facilitating community-level strategic planning and development projects to sustain local farming.

Approach and Methods
The two year project included the following activities.
1. Two annual “Farming For the Future” leadership workshops to build participant skills and knowledge for successful community-based dialogue, strategic planning and agriculture development projects. The workshops included three types of sessions: group process skills-building sessions; focus sessions on particular agriculture development topics; and team project planning sessions. Approximately 100 people attended each event, 80 percent of them registering as teams of partners from a local or regional community. An extensive Resource Notebook was compiled for workshop participants, with over 400 pages of materials provided in thirteen different content areas.
2. Two study tours for participants to learn firsthand about innovative community agriculture development strategies. In the fall of 1996, more than a hundred participants attended two study tours contrasting two community agriculture development strategies in two very different contexts: Dutchess County and Jefferson County, New York.
3. Ongoing outreach, networking and direct assistance to help participants put training into practice. After the 1996 workshop, project staff began providing follow-up support to a number of community-based teams and to a statewide working group which was organized to continue the networking process.
4. Production of printed resource materials to reach a wider, national audience. Workshop resource materials were updated, expanded, and made available to a national audience either as a complete Resource Notebook (400+ pages) or as separate topical resource packets. A final comprehensive bulletin, tentatively entitled “Farming For the Future: A Guide to Sustaining Agriculture in Your Community,” is soon to be published.

All of these activities were designed to help participants gain skills and knowledge for increased effectiveness in:
Organizing and facilitating community-level dialogue and, where needed, mediating conflicts about agricultural issues among people with diverse perspectives and interests (objective 1).
Facilitating community-level strategic planning and development projects to sustain local farming (objective 2).
In addition, project activities fostered an interactive network of participants who could continue to learn from each others’ experiences in the field.

Project Participants
The primary target audience for this project was Cooperative Extension field staff and other USDA agency staff who work directly with farmers. In addition, since by definition community agriculture development brings together diverse stakeholders, this project was designed to engage farmers themselves and a wide variety of potential leaders, including members of community development groups, planning boards, watershed protection organizations, County Agriculture and Farmland Protection Boards, agribusiness, Soil and Water Conservation Districts, environmental groups and agencies, and interested individuals.

Our focus was primarily on New York State and secondarily the Northeast region, however many participants in the second leadership workshop came from outside the region.

The project was quite successful in attracting an appropriate diversity of participants. This diversity was one of the most important and valuable features of project activities, as it allowed participants to directly experience and benefit from diverse perspectives and knowledge and reflected the same variety of stakeholder groups they are likely to have to work with back in their own communities.

The high level of participation of Cooperative Extension staff is noteworthy. Previous annual conferences organized by the Farming Alternatives Program had never been so successful in attracting extension personnel. We believe our success this time was due to several factors:
a high level of interest in agriculture development at the local level (the right issue at the right time);
Cornell Cooperative Extension administration’s direct sponsorship of the project, which included help in publicizing and encouraging field staff to participate (the right partners with the right connections and leverage);
increasing acceptance of “sustainable agriculture” and organizations identified with it, including the Farming Alternatives Program, by “mainstream” agriculture groups such as extension.

Recommendations
There is a continuing need to share information about successful and unsuccessful agricultural development strategies among all of these groups through workshops, study tours, electronic media, extension and agricultural media, publications etc. The process of building skills, knowledge and experience needs to continue, both to strengthen the effectiveness of current project participants and to reach greater numbers of individuals and communities.

Research is much needed to evaluate which strategies are effective in actually stabilizing and sustaining agriculture as an economically viable, environmentally enhancing and socially-enriching component of northeast communities. As a first step, “sustainability indicators” for agriculture need to be established, on the local level and by the state or region. Data need to be collected or at least assembled from a variety of sources to establish benchmarks for measuring progress towards or away from sustainability. This would require a combined research/professional development effort to identify these indicators and put them into practice.

Another need is to help extension educators be more effective in providing marketing assistance to local producers. There are a variety of roles that can be played, including researching marketing opportunities; connecting farmers with wholesale buyers; educating consumers; helping to organize marketing initiatives such as cooperatives; facilitating other agency involvement; and nurturing new marketing enterprises.

Other Participants
Jefferson County Industrial Development Agency, New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, New York State Assembly Subcommittee on Food, Farm & Nutrition Policy, Franklin Associates, Seaway Trails Inc., Howard County (Maryland) Economic Development Agency, Lancaster County (Pennsylvania) Chamber of Commerce, NY Rural Development Council.
Reported December 1997.

Collaborators: