In the age of climate change, this country’s land grant universities are working overtime to assure that farmers can feed a growing world population. For Virginia State and Virginia Tech, that means reaching out to cities and to countries around the world.
160 years ago, the U.S. opened its first land grant university – committed to teaching, research and service. The federal government donated 30,000 acres to any school willing to use its wisdom to help the public.
Ed Jones is associate dean of the College of Agriculture at Virginia Tech. “The goal was to create an educational opportunity for the sons and daughters of the working class, and one of the biggest economic engines in our country at the time was agriculture, so the agriculture experiment stations were created," he explains. "Then a few years later they realized that information that was being developed needed to get into the hands of people who could use it.”
In 1914, Cooperative Extension was born – an organization modeled after what Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver had done at Tuskegee University. M. Ray McKinnie is Dean of the College of Agriculture at Virginia State.
“They developed a wagon with all the latest technologies and modern things of its time and then went out to the rural communities of Alabama. They were taking the university to the people,” McKinnie says.
Today, of course, many of the people live in cities and suburbs, so Cooperative Extension does many of its programs in urban areas and online, and McKinnie says the youth division of Cooperative Extension – 4-H – is no longer about showing animals at the county fair or baking award-winning pies.
“There is still some of that," McKinnie concedes, "but there’s a lot more now. They’re being involved in citizenship, leadership, life skills and career development.”
Extension also offers a weekend program for anyone interested in sustainable, urban agriculture. After 12 Saturdays in classrooms, laboratories and the field and a 60-hour internship, students are certified to grow a range of crops. McKinnie says, "You can grow fresh leafy greens in a highly populated area in a controlled environment. We’re also doing work now with berries. We’re doing work with ginger and turmeric, which have health benefits.”
They also learn about fish farming and raising chickens, sheep and goats in areas where zoning permits. But Cooperative Extension doesn’t stop there. Virginia’s program has gone overseas to help farmers. Professor Ozzie Abaye is Director of Global Food Security and Health at Virginia Tech. She oversaw introduction of a new crop in Senegal – the mung bean, which experts thought would grow well there and improve nutrition.
“The mung bean is mostly an Asian crop," she says. "We also wanted to introduce a few recipes to help them actually make mung bean in so many different ways.”
Locals celebrated the success of that program, as did farmers in Ethiopia where McKinnie says Cooperative Extension introduced a beetle and a weevil that devour the invasive pathenium plant.
Here in the Commonwealth, Cooperative Extension has helped with long-term disaster recovery and is helping to address the opioid epidemic. Again, Virginia Tech’s Ed Jones.
“You know, we can do programing on how to work with youth, on how to do new production practices. But if individuals are suffering from opioid addiction, those programs won’t matter,” he explains.
And when the COVID pandemic hit, Jones said this organization used the credibility of agricultural extension agents to promote vaccination.
“We’re a science-informed organization, and the science tells us the vaccine is an important piece of ending this pandemic.”
Cooperative Extension even organized community sewing circles to produce masks and provided activity kits for children who were displaced from their classrooms.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
