Project Overview
Commodities
- Agronomic: grass (misc. annual), grass (misc. perennial), hay
- Fruits: grapes
- Animals: bovine, fish, sheep
- Animal Products: dairy, eggs, meat
Practices
- Animal Production: aquaculture, manure management, pasture renovation
- Crop Production: application rate management
- Education and Training: extension, on-farm/ranch research, technical assistance, workshop
- Farm Business Management: community-supported agriculture, labor/employment
- Soil Management: soil analysis, soil chemistry, soil quality/health
- Sustainable Communities: community development, quality of life, urban agriculture
Abstract:
In order to streamline the execution of the PDP program in California, used the PDP award to fund mini-grants. We have an established advisory committee that prioritized funding criteria (see below) and reviewed the submitted proposals for this proposal’s funding cycle. The California PDP program funded mini-grants in which recipients developed educational approaches tailored to the target audience and appropriate for the sustainable agriculture topic addressed. The five projects funded used the following educational approaches: webinars, virtual and in-person workshops, field days, and panel discussions.
The incredible diversity of California’s agriculture creates an equally diverse need for educational and professional development. High-priority topics identified by the advisory committee and advertised during the RFP were:
- Climate change
- Fire: Wild and Prescribed
- Nutrient management practices to minimize environmental impairments
- Water use efficiency
- Integrated Pest Management
- Alternative marketing approaches
- Succession planning
- Community-based food systems
- Agricultural community disaster preparedness
These identified topics helped to prioritize projects during the review of PDP mini-grant proposals. The topics of the 4 mini-grant proposals that were successfully funded are as follows:
- Responding to growing trends: Increasing capacity for California aquaponic agriculture through targeted education
- Nitrate optimization methods with California certified crop advisors
- Building equitable community-based food systems in Silicon Valley
- Marin County agriculture professional development program
Project objectives:
The overall goal of this project is to increase the capacity of Cooperative Extension personnel, NRCS field staff, and other agricultural professionals to apply the principals of sustainable agriculture while working with their clientele (Farmers, ranchers, consumers, youth, businesses, government, and communities). The four funded projects 1) extended emerging sustainable agricultural practices to extension educators and agricultural professionals, and 2) brought together extension educators and university faculty working on sustainable agriculture to develop collaborative priorities, goals, and strategies for researching and extending sustainable agriculture issues.
The advisory committee decided to prioritize projects that meet the aforementioned topic needs and projects that reach the largest number of participants. Additionally, projects that produced outputs that have a longer shelf-life and continue to be a source for increasing knowledge into the future were also favored. We were excited that both project size and duration increased with these larger grants. We are hopeful that deeper knowledge and skill was gained through educational programs with longer durations. We had an expectation is that each mini-grant will train between 15 and 100 extension educators or agriculture professionals. Grant recipients were required to use participant evaluations in each educational event (summarized later in this report) so that feedback could be provided to the California PDP advisory panel on the acquisition of learning objectives for each project. The advisory panel will use workshop evaluations and general knowledge within their professional cadres to develop ideas and priorities for future PDP activities in California.