Sustainability: The Future of Cooperative Extension Programming

Okay, I’m convinced: The biggest issue for Extension for the foreseeable future will be sustainability.  The recent columns of three New York Times writers helped close the sale for me.

Here’s why:

First, persistent concerns about the carbon threat.  Granted, I’m not entirely convinced that global warming is real.  But then again, I’m no expert.  And the fact remains that a majority of this nation’s policymakers and pundits believe it to be true.  Thomas Friedman perceives it not only as a real but even as an immediate threat, especially considering the possibility that

… the next emitted carbon molecule will tip over some ecosystem and trigger a nonlinear event — like melting the Siberian tundra and releasing all its methane, or drying up the Amazon or melt all the sea ice in the North Pole in summer.  And when one ecosystem collapses, it can trigger unpredictable climate changes in others that could alter our entire world.

And there is the added threat of chronic debt and especially of its long-term implications for America’s future.  As Friedman observes,

…One need only look at today’s record-setting price of gold, in a period of deflation, to know that a lot of people are worried that our next dollar of debt— unbalanced by spending cuts or new tax revenues — will trigger a nonlinear move out of the dollar and torpedo the U.S. economy.

The worst-case scenario: A future in which U.S. national and local governments, faced with insurmountable debt levels, will no longer be able to make the public investments necessary to secure the future of younger generations of Americans.

If these factors have not yet bred a culture of malaise, they have put Americans into what Roger Cohen describes as a “different mental place.”

They’re paying down debt. They’re not hiring. They’ve gotten reacquainted with risk. They’re going to have to survive without Gourmet magazine.

And in the future, this will force Americans, whether they live in red or blue states, to put aside obsolescent cultural warfare and to embark on what David Brooks describes as a “crusade for economic self-restraint.”

Indeed, to an increasing degree, the elites as well as ordinary people fear that humanity is dealing with an ailing economic model that may even be teetering on collapse.

Add to that the concerns about the appalling state of American health, which to an increasing degree are ascribed to the current U.S. farm production system.  But there is an even bigger sustainability issue associated with health: The growing strains within the U.S. medical system that inevitably will force a greater emphasis on preventive health care – sustainability by any other name.

Simply put, for a variety of reasons, there is a growing, if not full-blown sense of malaise in 21st century America — which brings us back to that word again: sustainability.

Some elites and ordinary people alike are more disposed to this term than ever before.

Sustainability affords Cooperative Extension the opportunity to burnish our image, demonstrating to our clients and stakeholders how we will play an integral role helping build new production systems that factor in growing economic and environmental concerns.  As one of my Extension colleagues pointed out recently, we played a major role in building the so-called factory farming system.  Now we must demonstrate how we are helping people move toward production systems that are more environmentally sustainable.

Sustainability also empowers us in another way: It presents us with a golden opportunity to undertake one of the most important challenges of this century: to close the circle, showing how sustainability relates to all of us.  Yes, we help the planet by doing everything from recycling to adopting greener production systems, but we also help humanity – and, ultimately, our strained medical system — by adopting sustainable lifestyles that emphasize prevention.

Yes, I know, we’ve been promoting health lifestyles for years, but now the stars are aligned in a way they have never been before.

While I’ll confess to some bias, I believe no other organization is better equipped than Cooperative Extenison to educate people about what is undoubtedly the most important challenge of  the 21^st century— building systems that will sustain our planet as well as our personal well-being.

 Yes, sustainability is the future of Cooperative Extension.

What Cooperative Extension Sorely Needs: More Public Intellectuals

What has become of America’s scientific vanguard — those people who helped inspire and create a technological civilization that, up to now, at least, has been the envy of the world?

That’s a good question.   As a matter of fact, for Extension educators, it’s not just a good question, it’s a paramount question.  For almost a century, we have comprised a vital component of that vanguard.

Why is this question now so paramount? Because as sound science rapidly loses ground to junk science, Cooperative Extension educators are lining up on what many Americans, however unjustly, consider to be the wrong side of the debate.

You’ve seen it, I’ve seen it — virtually everyone employed in Cooperative Extension work has seen the growing disdain, particularly among many of the nation’s public intellectuals, for any farming method deemed “unnatural,” whether this involves tilling or applying herbicides or insecticides.

Among ordinary Americans, this thinking has taken on an almost conspiratorial hue.  Case in point:  Commenting on my recent online newspaper column on the economic challenges associated with raising free-range chicken, one respondent pointed to a USDA “conspiracy” against small-scale growers —one in which Cooperative Extension purportedly serves an active, conscious agent.

Today, New York Times blogger Tom Kuntz weighed into this increasingly contentious but woefully underreported debate.

Among other prominent figures in this debate, Kuntz cited Missouri farmer Blake Hurst, who has worked on his family farm for more than 30 years.  In response to an Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Hurst summarized the pro-farming side of the debate:

Much of his argument comes down to: beware the law of unintended agricultural consequences. Farming without herbicides means more tilling and more erosion. Let turkeys roam outside and they’re prone to attack by weasels, or drowning by their own upturned beaks in downpours. Freeing massive hogs from confinement crates means they sometimes crush their piglets to death, or eat them right after they’re born.

Anyone associated with commercial agriculture understands this.  Farming functions on the basis of common sense rather on than some malicious intent to defraud consumers. 

Is there still a place for organic food production? Yes, absolutely.  But without these common sense practices, which involve everything from herbicide and pesticide application to livestock vaccination, we would be deprived of a food production and distribution system that enables less than 2 percent of the population to feed the remaining 98 percent with a measure of efficiency and safety than earlier generations would have found mindboggling.

It’s an important, if not vital, point, though one that is increasingly failing to get through to public intellectuals and ordinary Americans like.

And, frankly, I think it implies a lapse, if not an outright failure, on our part.  Communicating these sorts of complex issues in a way that public intellectuals and ordinary people can grasp is a task which could — should — be entrusted to Cooperative Extension educators.

Indeed, from the very beginning, Extension agents and specialists have functioned as scientific vanguards, showing people how to put scientific knowledge to practical use. It’s one of the greatest strengths of Cooperative Extension, though one that has never been cultivated to its fullest potential.  It’s time that it was.

We need more Blake Hursts.

Here is my suggestion: that we start cultivating the talents of our best scientific educators. The most promising of those educators should be developed into nothing less than public intellectuals — people who know how to identify and capitalize on opportunities to advance a public understanding of and appreciation for sound science.

Some of the skills with which they should be equipped: how to develop and write effective blogs; how to formulate and write op-eds; and how to communicate in a manner that not only is readily grasped but that also serves as an impetus for action.

We must create a vanguard of public intellectuals capable of serving at the state and national levels. And we should cultivate and promote them in the same manner with the Division I universities do star athletes.

Finding Our Groove in The Niche

Yes, I’ll concede that Chris Anderson may harbor some anti-media bias.

The editor-in-chief of Wired eschews terms such as newspaper and media because he considers them outmoded — relics of the last century. And speaking as a product of 20^th century media training, I think Anderson is right — dead right. (See my previous diatribe on demassification for my rationale.)

Granted, there always will be a place for the kind of reporting that once distinguished traditional journalism, even as an increasingly greater share of online content is generated by amateurs. 

Even so, while some forms of traditional journalism will survive, they will be mixed up with the other information that is increasingly disseminated through social filters.   As Anderson says,

I read lots of articles from mainstream media but I don’t go to mainstream media directly to read it.  It comes to me, which is really quite common these days.  More and more people are choosing social filters for their news rather than professional filters.  We’re turning out television news, we’re turning out newspapers. And we still hear about the important stuff, it’s just that it’s not like this drumbeat of bad news.  It’s news that matters.  I figure by the time something gets to me it’s been vetted those I trust.  So the stupid stuff that doesn’t matter is not going to get to me.

Yes, it is a brave new world out there — and an intimating one too.  And this raises the question: What will this mean for organizations that have  felt more at home with older media - organizations such as  Cooperative Extension , which have traditionally looked to these older media to disseminate their messages? How will they manage to compete in a world with so many players offering so many products, whatever these happen to be?

I admit I remain an incorrigible pessimist about most things.  But on the subject of the online economy and Cooperative Extension’s place in it, I remain cautiously optimistic.

Why?

First, because this is one area in which our institutional mindset may work in our favor. 

As Anderson points out, most people blog for nonmonetary reasons — either because they want to draw attention to themselves or because they feel a passion for what they write about.  Extension is teeming with legions of passionate educators, quite a few of whom also write well.  Put these two together — passion and a knack for expression— and you have the makings of several highly effective and competitive blogs. 

Second, as Anderson observes, the default price of the emerging online economy is zero.  Compared with the older, conventional economy, an astonishing share of the offerings is free.

Free is the force of gravity.  If we decide to resist it, then somebody else will compete with something that is free.  The marketplace follows the underlying economics. You can be free or you can compete with free. That’s the only choice there is. 

Until recently, people have generally assumed that anything free was low-rate compared to its priced counterpart.  The online economy is changing this.  And this change of mind ultimately may work to the distinct advantage of Cooperative Extension-related products and services.

Freeness may also benefit us in another way — the same way it already is aiding other public and private entities: by helping us better leverage our fee-based efforts.   

Anderson points out how private companies are learning to use free content to attract audiences.  They’ve learned it’s to their advantage not to charge for the most popular stuff.  Instead, they charge for the “niche stuff” that people are willing to pay for.

As I see it, Cooperative Extension administrators and educators should invest considerably more thought into how our most popular stuff, such as publications, videos and other materials, can be used to whet our audiences’ appetites for the more enriched, specialized forms of instruction — the “niche stuff,” which could include webinars, workshops and field days — the stuff for which they would gladly pay.

Who Says 4-H is Passe?

Maybe it’s a middle-aged thing, but as I age I spend more time reflecting on the people, things and events throughout my life that not only made me happy but that also have contributed to the person I’ve become.

Many of the deepest insights I’ve gained over the last quarter century have been through close association with other Cooperative Extension professionals, such as Dr. Ned Browning.

Ned regrettably left Alabama to take an administrative post at another state Extension headquarters while I was still a comparative greenhorn.

But he left a lasting impression. Aside from being a well-integrated person psychologically, he evinced a deep familiarity with many practical things —one that complemented the more abstract, academic knowledge he had acquired in the course of completing his doctoral work.

Over time, though, I learned that this ability to integrate practical with more abstract forms of knowledge seamlessly and in ways that benefitted people was one of the hallmarks of the Extension educator — working knowledge as I’ve come to call it.

A lot of Ned’s insights into balancing the practical with the more theoretical was acquired from the countless hours spent preparing for and competing in countless 4-H science demonstrations.

I was reminded of this recently while reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest best seller, Outliers: The Story of Success.

Gladwell makes a point that is often lost in this meritocratic, SAT-obsessed society: Smartness is only one component of success.  With it come important but far less tangible factors.

He cites Bill Gates as a shining example.  No doubt about it, Gates is one extremely smart cookie.  But in addition to smartness, he also secured another distinct advantage — as it turns out, one crucial advantage — that put him head and shoulders above many other smart contemporaries: immersion in what would become his lifetime passion and calling.

Way back in 1969, Gates became only one of a handful of grade-schoolers who got to do real-time programming on a main-frame computer located in the Seattle, WA, area where he lived.  The thousands of hours he logged over the next 7 years provided him with an intimate knowledge of programming that only a paltry few of his contemporaries managed to acquire.

In addition to putting him light years ahead of virtually every other kid on the planet harboring similar interests in computers, it also equipped him with incomparable advantages years later when he decided to drop out of Harvard and try his luck with software design.

Yes, luck certainly played a part in Gates’s subsequent success.  He was fortunate to have been born to wealthy, educated parents who helped foot some of the costs of these early endeavors.  Likewise, he was spent his childhood in a region of the country where cutting-edge computer research was taking place.

But it was the perspective he gained from deep immersion in real-time processing that put him head and shoulders above many of his contemporaries.

Consider for a moment the immense potential that is lost year after year, simply because children with similar abilities and passions are not afforded opportunities for immersion along with the deep insights this type of experience typically affords.

And that brings me back to 4-H.

We hear talk of youth development groups such as 4-H becoming passé.   Quite the contrary: Grassroots youth programs have a unique potential to provide children, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds, with opportunities that will secure lifetime success and, in rare cases, achievements on par with those of Bill Gates.

And considering the quantum scientific and technological advances that followed his immersion experience, aren’t these investments worth the cost?

Design, Design, Design!

What if I told you to read one book this year for the sake of your — and your employer’s — survival?

I have read one such book.  As a matter of fact, I’ve read it twice, taking care the second time to write notes in the page margins.

As a matter of fact, I would — if I could — require every Cooperative Extension professional in the United States to read this book.  As I see it, the very survival our organizations depends on whether we heed the lessons outlined in A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink.

If you are unwilling to read any further, I’ll summarize the basic theme of the book: Design!

To drive home the importance of this theme, I suggest that it be repeated as often as possible, almost like a Vedic mantra: Design! Design! Design!

So what accounts for the centrality of design in this emerging economy?  Pink cites three factors.

Abundance, Asia, Automation

In the past few decades, the global knowledge economy has produced something beyond the wildest dreams of earlier generations of humanity: abundance — a dazzling cornucopia of products encompassing every size, description and function.

But there’s a deeper, more disturbing dimension to this.  In the United States, most of the knowledge jobs — the sort of high-paying, high-tech professions that that inspired earlier generations of Americans to slog through four-year engineering curricula and similar courses of study — are rapidly and inexorably being outsourced to Asia.   As Pink stresses, the reason stems from simple economics:  overseas engineers and other high-tech professionals can be paid less to do the same high-tech work.

He also cites a third factor. Within the last few years, engineers have achieved quantum leaps in processing capacity, which have resulted in a new generation of computers equipped to undertake many highly complex tasks.

Pink cites a small British company, Appligenics, which has created a new application capable of writing hundreds of lines of software in less than a second.  Moreover, the processing power of computers has advanced to such a degree that tasks that once required the assistance of skilled knowledge workers — medical diagnoses or legal assistance, for example — can now be handled on-line with a few clicks of a mouse.

As Pink observes, some 100 million people across the planet go online to access health and medical information via more than 23,000 medical sites.  Needless to say, this is changing the way physicians serve their patients.  Ditto for attorneys.

Pink describes these three forces as “abundance, Asia and automation.”

Right-Brained Thinking

So, what is a professional in the West to do to survive within this radically changed environment? For starters, cultivate the part of the brain that is seldom given the credit it is due: the right side.

Pink contends that as three forces — abundance, Asia, and automation — exert more influences across the planet, the curtain is rising on a new era in human history: the Conceptual Age.

What does this new era mean for U.S. workers?

Mere survival today depends on being able to do something that overseas knowledge workers can’t do cheaper, that powerful computers can’t do faster, and that satisfies one of the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age.

This will involve incorporating a high-touch, high-concept approach into every product.  Likewise, workers will be judged by how well they are able “to create artistic and emotional beauty, to direct patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention.”

This will require ample amounts of creative ability associated with right-brain thinking — the reason why Pink predicts that the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) will ultimately replace the MBA as the professional credential of this new Conceptual Age.

Back to that word: design.

There is a lesson here for every professional, and especially those in Extension work.

In this Conceptual Age, no one can afford the luxury of winging it — of simply designing a mediocre educational product and assuming that since a certain brand is attached to it that people will use it.

Unless it incorporates Conceptual Age values — unless it’s high concept and high touch — it will be ignored for something else that fits the bill.

Yes, I know, back to that word again.

Improvising an Apology

This morning, I woke up with the term “muddle” bouncing around in my head.  I applied that term recently to describe Extension’s longstanding practice of working through problems over time rather than applying solutions too quickly — an organizational trait I consider to be one of our strongest, albeit with some reservations.

I’ve been a little uneasy about that choice of words ever since.

Anyway, I looked up the word in the online dictionary and my worst fears were confirmed.  Among other things, muddle means “to cause to become mentally confused.” 

Yes, I admit it: I overstated my case.

Improvise may be a better verb for the argument I’m trying to make.

So consider this post an improvised change of heart.

Muddling Through: The Great Extension Dilemma

I’ve often joked that the Cooperative Extension concept shares a lot in common with the British.

Britons, namely the English, have always evinced a strong prejudice against applying quick fixes to complex problems.   They prefer to muddle through — to work through problems over time.

So do we.  Extension educators are muddlers.  Like the English, we prefer to work toward complex solutions over time.  We tend to be wary of applying grand solutions too quickly.

As I see it, this is our greatest strength — and one of our most serious weaknesses.

The good news, I think, is that this longstanding organizational trait uniquely positions us to compete in an increasingly wikinomical knowledge landscape — far better than many other public and private players, in fact. We readily share what we know and work with other public and private partners to bring our resources to bear on complex problems.

Collaborative knowledge is as intrinsic to the Extension experience as bats and gloves are to baseball.  We’ve been in the collaborative knowledge business for a long time.  Seaman Knapps’s Terrell, Texas, farm demonstration plots are arguably an early 20th century forerunner of wikinomics.

Need I even mention agricultural field days and 4-H demonstrations of every conceivable kind? Extension’s legacy of shared knowledge would fill volumes.

Here’s the rub: The penchant for working slowly through problems is also reflected in our organization’s development.  There has always been a sort of ad hoc quality to Extension’s organizational structure.

Our organizational structures have been cobbled together to address pressing needs.  It’s been this way from the very beginning, even before formal passage of the Smith-Lever Act, when Seaman Knapp and Alabama Polytechnic Institute President C.C. Thach hastily patched together a memorandum of understanding to govern how the U.S. Department of Agriculture would collaborate with API to carry out Extension work in the state — an agreement that subsequently served as the blueprint for Extension programs throughout the nation.

Yes, it worked reasonably well.  But within the last century, this discursive approach has also contributed to a murky undersanding of our organizational mission within our ranks.  Even worse, the public’s grasp of who we are and what we do is even more tenuous.  And in an era of reduced funding at all levels, this is not a good thing.

This is Extension’s principal dilemma: a legacy that both helps and hinders.

What can we do about it?

More about that later…

Banishing the “Hick” Factor

Discussing the history of land-grant universities with Carolyn Whatley yesterday, I was reminded of a quote I mined recently from Peter Watson’s Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, From Fire to Freud. He pointed out in one chapter how unfavorably science and practical knowledge in general were viewed in Germany — where the humanities were almost universally regarded as sole hallmarks of high learning and culture — even while they were held in universally high regard in America and the other English-speaking countries.

 

Whereas in a country like England, or America, the sciences and the arts were, to a much greater extent, seen as two sides of the same coin, jointly forming the intellectual elite, this was much less true in nineteenth-century Germany. A good example is Max Planck, the physicist who (in 1900) discovered the quantum, the idea that all energy comes in very small packets, or quanta. Planck came from a very religious, somewhat academic family, and was himself an excellent pianist. Despite the fact that his discovery of the quantum rates as one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time, in Planck’s own family the humanities were considered a superior form of knowledge to science. His cousin, the historian Max Lenz, would jokingly pun that scientists (Naturforsher) were in reality foresters (Naturforster) – or, as he would say, hicks.

This raises an interesting question: What role have land-grant universities and Cooperative Extenison played in elevating science and the practical arts to the same plane as the humanities?

Hospice Management for Old Media?

A few years ago, a community development specialist and true-blue Extension professional bluntly stated that the only viable strategy for many declining rural communities was a Hospice approach.

About all that could be done for residents in these terminal communities, he believed, was to make the downward spiral as painless as possible.

 

I was shocked.  Then, after thinking about it, the rationalist in me prevailed. Why invest limited public resources in a community that has no hope for long-term survival?

 

Likewise, the thought occurred to me more than once that old media — and by that, I mean conventional mass media — should be managed much the same way.  Futurist Alvin Toffler, author of the utterly prophetic book, the Third Wave, written more than a generation ago, saw things pretty much the same way.  He foresaw the decline of conventional mass media.  He even predicted that these older mass media — newspapers, radio and television — eventually would be superseded by what he aptly termed “demassified media.”  (And what is the Web other than a form of radically demassified media?)

 

Toffler even predicted that all media, including what now passes as print and broadcast media, eventually would emanate from one device he described as a VDT (video display terminal).  Granted, he didn’t get it completely right — yet, at least — though he was right about one thing:  from Sirius Satellite Radio and Direct Broadcast Satellite to news and blog filtering, we’re exposed to an infinite variety of media driven entirely by individual choice.  Back to that word again — demassification.

 

And that brings me back to my original point: What should we, as Extension professionals, do about conventional media?

 

Only a short time ago, my advice would have been to adopt a Hospice approach — to continue serving old media users as effectively as possible while devoting an ever greater number of our resources to new media. 

Then the thought occurred to me: There no longer is such a thing has mass media.  With the advent of the Web, everything, including conventional media, has become demassified. 

People no longer are married to newspapers, radio and television stations, or even Web sites.   They are interested only in content that suits them. In the case of the Web, for example, they are finding this content via search engines.

 

So, instead of a Hospice approach, my first advice would be simply to divest oneself of any residue of massified thinking.  Newspaper, radio and television now are only small parts of a considerably larger picture — valuable, yes, but only elements of a much larger mosaic. Likewise, there is no such thing as an Extension audience but rather an infinite variety of micro-audiences that are still amenable to Extension knowledge, provided it’s disseminated in the right way.

Evolve or Perish: The Cooperative Extension Imperative

An article that ran recently in the Christian Science Monitor serves as an excellent post script to yesterday’s musings.

 

Even the nation’s leading national newspapers, however reluctantly, have reached the same conclusion that many of us already share, namely that there is an evolutionary imperative associated with the Web that means exactly that — we either evolve or perish.  

Newspapers either will adapt to the web by featuring client-driven content or they will go increasingly unread. And if they are left unread, well, you get the picture - eventual extinction.  Two of the biggest players in the newspaper business, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have reached that painful conclusion.  And as they are learning, part of this will involve removing their pay-to-read firewalls and offering entirely free content.

 

Yes, there are risks associated with this transition, potentially fatal risks.  If everything the newspaper posts online is free, why should anyone bother to subscribe?  And if people aren’t subscribing, what will become of advertisers, the newspaper’s traditional bread and butter?

 

Pertinent questions, to say the least.  But the fact remains that newspapers are between the proverbial rock and hard place. There are the even more potentially calamitous risks associated with maintaining the status quo.  The simple fact of life is that the evolutionary imperative of the Web simply can no longer be ignored.  Client-driven content and the Web essentially are synonymous, and anyone who can’t see that had better head for the nearest tar pit or start growing feathers.  Back to that underlying theme again: evolve or perish.  

There is no turning back.

Fortunately, many online papers have chosen to grow feathers.  They have come to terms with the fact that in this client-driven, cut-and-paste world, pay-only content doesn’t stay that way for very long. 

 

“They can’t ignore the Web,” writes the Monitor’s Dante Chinni.  “They understand they have to find a way to move online.  But they aren’t exactly happy about it and they are unsure how the economics are going to play out.”

 

Like it or not, the brave new world awaits. And one of the biggest immediate challenges for newspapers will be feeling their way through this new world.  How will news organizations that evolved in a print-oriented, pay-only world work in a totally free-content environment? For that matter, how will it learn to adjust in a socially networked world — the growing preference of a rising generation of news aficionados?

 

Good questions.  Speaking as a 46-year-old former newspaper junkie, I will say that old-line newspapers have one thing going for them — a history.  Despite some egregious mistakes within the last few years, newspapers do have a long history of covering and reporting the news reasonably accurately.  There is still some luster to names such as the Times and Wall Street Journal, even if some Jurassic DNA has crept into their genome within the last few years — luster that can serve them well in the new media.  And what is badly needed in this tempestuous sea of blogging, twittering and flickring is ballast — or, to put it another way, adding some focus, balance and context to this welter of Web-based information.  Online newspapers have the potential of providing some of this ballast. 

And there is a lesson here for Cooperative Extension.  We have a long history, a virtually century-old history. And, yes, there is still some luster associated with our name and our mission, though we do have some cob webs to clear.  The good news is that if we manage to clear them, we have the potential of providing our audiences with similar type of ballast provided by old news organizatons — potentially, at least.

 

Perhaps the most important question is how -  how will Cooperative Extension, an organization nurtured within an early 20th century social, cultural and technological context, strive to remain relevant in the client-driven and increasingly socially networked world of the 21st century?

 

What is our game plan?  That remains to be seen.