- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Over the last 100 years, the UC ANR 4-H Youth Development Program has taught California children about food, agriculture, leadership and community service using learn-by-doing practices. To offer 4-H expertise to children south of the border, Vice President Glenda Humiston traveled to Mexicali to sign a memorandum of understanding with Baja California Secretary of Agriculture Manuel Vallodolid Seamanduras on Jan. 20.
“The need for education doesn't stop at the border,” said Lupita Fábregas, assistant director for 4-H diversity and expansion and UC Cooperative Extension 4-H advisor. “The wonderful educational opportunities available to California youth are now being offered to a group of children in Mexicali. And that program will be a model for the rest of Baja California and Mexico.”
Today, projects in new technologies – like drones and rocketry – join more traditional projects – like cooking, sewing, animal husbandry and farming – to give youths channels to explore a wide variety of options and interests.
“We are looking into expanding to community colleges and offering education for future entrepreneurs or youth interested in skilled trades,” said Humiston, who credits 4-H with enabling her to be the first in her family to attend college.
The establishment of a club like 4-H in Mexico is the fulfillment of a life's dream for Claudia Diaz Carrasco, 4-H youth development advisor in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
“I found my passion,” said the native of Mexico City. “To solve world hunger, we need to find solutions one community at a time. 4-H does that.”
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
4-H Youth Development advisors Dorina Espinoza, Russell Hill, Fe Moncloa and Keith Nathaniel and 4-H associate director Shannon Horrillo have won the National Extension Diversity Award for systematically enhancing the intercultural competency of 4-H personnel and others in California. Moncloa and Hill accepted the National Extension Diversity Award on behalf of the UC ANR team on Sunday, Nov. 13, at the 129th Association of Public and Land-grant Universities Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.
The award, given by USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Cooperative Extension System and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), honors the team for creating and using Intercultural Development Inventory© to shift organizational culture. This shift includes mutual respect, acceptance, teamwork and productivity among diverse people.
To meet the needs of a culturally and ethnically diverse youth population in California, they created a professional-development intervention for 4-H academics and staff. The Intercultural Development Inventory© is a cross-culturally generalizable, valid and reliable assessment of intercultural competence. Calling themselves the Intercultural Development Inventory Qualified Administrators, they applied the strategy over three years, providing 176 hours of intercultural communication feedback sessions, learning communities and regional conferences to enhance the intercultural competence of 65 4-H personnel.
Evaluations demonstrated that after the intervention UC 4-H Youth Development Program personnel had acquired skills and characteristics to become more culturally competent. The program has moved from focusing on similarities across diverse people that can mask deeper recognition of cultural differences to recognizing the complexity of dimensions of diversity.
The action plan and resulting positive change provides the potential to improve hiring and professional development nationwide by replication in other states. A summary of California's IDI professional development activities can be found in the National 4-H Latino Youth Outreach: Best Practices Toolkit, Professional Development.
Rebecca Ozeran joined UCCE on Sept. 12 as the area livestock and natural resources advisor in Fresno and Madera counties.
Raised in Yuba City with a passion for animals and the land that supports them, Ozeran plans to focus her research, outreach and extension education efforts on current issues impacting livestock producers and land managers in both counties.
Prior to joining UCCE, Ozeran was a range management intern for the Bureau of Land Management in the Salt Lake City field office. Her duties included collecting inventory, utilization and rangeland trend data, checking livestock compliance on BLM allotments and collaborating with local archaeologists to ensure compliance with archaeology requirements before grazing permit renewal. From July 2014 to May 2016, Ozeran was a graduate research and teaching assistant for the Department of Animal and Range Sciences at Montana State University.
She earned a B.S. in animal science with a minor in Spanish from Cal Poly, and an M.S. in animal and range sciences with a certificate in applied statistics from Montana State University. Her thesis studied patterns and risk factors of cheatgrass invasion in Montana foothills rangelands.
Ozeran is based in Fresno and be reached at (530) 415-2555 and rkozeran@ucanr.edu.
Axelson joins UCCE as forest health specialist
Jodi Axelson joined UCCE on June 1 as a UC Cooperative Extension specialist in forest health in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM) at UC Berkeley.
Axelson's broad research interests include forest resilience, adaptive management and forest disturbance; specifically, she is focused on forest dynamics and response to insect disturbances from outbreaks of bark beetles and conifer defoliators using a range of methods including dendrochronology. Learn more about her research at http://ourenvironment.berkeley.edu.
Prior to joining UCCE, Axelson was employed by the British Columbia government as a forest entomologist with Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations. In this position, she was responsible for forest health issues in an area covering 42,000 square miles comprised of distinct wet- and dry-belt ecosystems. She gained considerable experience in taking into consideration timber, wildlife and land stewardship objectives when performing insect monitoring, treatment and risk-mitigation.
She earned her B.S. in geography from the University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada), an M.S. in geography from the University of Regina (Saskatchewan, Canada) and a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Victoria.
Axelson is based at the UC Berkeley campus and can be reached at (510) 642-8459 and jodi.axelson@berkeley.edu. Follow her on Twitter @DisturbedDendro.
Haghverdi joins UCCE as urban water specialist
Amir Haghverdi joined UCCE on July 1 as a UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Environmental Sciences at UC Riverside. His research focuses on integrated urban water management.
Prior to joining UCCE, Haghverdi had been an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, performing research and extension on irrigation and water management, since July 2015.
Haghverdi earned his B.S. in irrigation engineering from University of Tehran, Iran, an M.S. in agricultural engineering - irrigation and drainage from Bu-Ali Sina University, Iran, a Ph.D. in irrigation and drainage engineering from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran, and a Ph.D. in biosystems engineering from University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
Haghverdi can be reached at (951) 827-4774 and amir.haghverdi@ucr.edu.
Saitone named ag economics specialist
Prior to joining UCCE, Saitone had been a project scientist for ARE since July 2015. Before returning to UC Davis, she worked for OnPoint Analytics, an economic consulting firm in the Bay Area, where she conducted research on a wide variety of agricultural industries including meatpacking, dairy, eggs, broilers and sugar beets.
Saitone earned her B.A. in economics at Sonoma State University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics at UC Davis.
Saitone can be reached at (530) 752-1870 and saitone@primal.ucdavis.edu.
Bautista named 4-H STEM coordinator
Jessica Bautista joined ANR on July 5 as the 4-H Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) academic coordinator.
Prior to joining ANR, Bautista was a graduate research assistant in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at UC Riverside. Bautista's area of research interest focused on molecular biology and genetics in plant developmental biology.
As a native Californian and a first-generation student born to Mexican migrant parents, Bautista speaks Spanish and has fostered various methods to make her research accessible and advocate for STEM career paths for underrepresented communities. In 2012, Bautista co-founded UCR's Plant Discovery Day in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences. This annual outreach event is filled with interactive science demonstrations for elementary school students in the community. She has also presented her research and discussed her career path annually since 2013 at workshops geared towards teaching and empowering young Latina women to pursue higher education and various career options.
Bautista completed a B.S. in biotechnology (chemistry minor) from California State University Northridge and a Ph.D. in plant biology from UC Riverside.
Bautista is based at the ANR building in Davis and can be reached at (530) 750-1341 and jbautista@ucanr.edu.
Pourreza wins international prize for HLB detection
Newly appointed UC Cooperative Extension agricultural engineering advisor Alireza Pourreza has been awarded the 2016 Giuseppe Pellizzi Prize by the Club of Bologna, an honor presented every other year to the best doctoral dissertations focused on agricultural machinery and mechanization. The Club of Bologna is a world taskforce on strategies for the development of agricultural mechanization.
Pourreza, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Florida in 2014, worked on early detection of Huanglongbing disease of citrus. Huanglongbing, an incurable disease that is spread by Asian citrus psyllid, has seriously impacted citrus production in Florida. The disease has been found in commercial and residential sites in all counties with commercial citrus.
Early detection allows growers to remove infected trees before the disease can spread to healthy trees. Currently HLB infection is confirmed when leaves with yellowing blotches are submitted for PCR testing, which is expensive and time-consuming. However, the yellowing can be also symptomatic of other conditions, such as nutrient deficiency.
"We discovered we could see the symptoms of Huanglongbing using a camera, a set of cross-polarizers and narrowband lighting before it is visible to the human eye," said Pourreza, who is based at the UC Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center in Parlier.
He said the yellow blotches on HLB-infected leaves are caused by starch accumulation.
"If we could detect abnormal levels of starch in the leaf, we could tell it is affected with HLB," Pourreza said. "Starch showed the ability to rotate the polarization plane of light. We used this optical characteristic to develop the sensing methodology."
Pourreza said the team has patented the technique and is working on developing a commercial product. He is seeking funding to continue the research in California, where, to date, HLB has only been detected in isolated Los Angeles neighborhoods. Asian citrus psyllid is found in important California commercial citrus production regions from the Mexican border to as far north as Placer County.
4-H Youth Development team wins national diversity award
4-H Youth Development advisors Dorina Espinoza, Russell Hill, Fe Moncloa and Keith Nathaniel and 4-H associate director Shannon Horrillo have won the National Extension Diversity Award for systematically enhancing the intercultural competency of 4-H personnel and others in California.
The award, given by USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Cooperative Extension System and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), honors the team for creating and using Intercultural Development Inventory© to shift organizational culture. This shift includes mutual respect, acceptance, teamwork and productivity among diverse people.
To meet the needs of a culturally and ethnically diverse youth population in California, they created a professional-development intervention for 4-H academics and staff. The Intercultural Development Inventory© is a cross-culturally generalizable, valid and reliable assessment of intercultural competence. Calling themselves the Intercultural Development Inventory Qualified Administrators, they applied the strategy over three years, providing 176 hours of intercultural communication feedback sessions, learning communities and regional conferences to enhance the intercultural competence of 65 4-H personnel.
Evaluations demonstrated that after the intervention UC 4-H Youth Development Program personnel had acquired skills and characteristics to become more culturally competent. The program has moved from focusing on similarities across diverse people that can mask deeper recognition of cultural differences to recognizing the complexity of dimensions of diversity.
The action plan and resulting positive change provides the potential to improve hiring and professional development nationwide by replication in other states. A summary of California's IDI professional development activities can be found in the National 4-H Latino Youth Outreach: Best Practices Toolkit, Professional Development.
The National Extension Diversity Award will be presented on Nov. 13 at the 129th APLU Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.
Junge, who retired in 2009 after nearly 40 years of working with UC ANR's 4-H Youth Development Program, was among 16 people inducted during the ceremony at the National 4-H Youth Conference Center on Oct. 9 in Chevy Chase, Md.
“Sharon is fully invested in 4-H and the powerful impact 4-H makes on the lives of youth, families and communities,” said Shannon Horrillo, associate director of 4-H Program and Policy.
The 2015 National 4-H Hall of Fame honoree became a 4-H youth development and nutrition, family and consumer sciences advisor for Placer and Nevada counties in 1972. She became county director for those counties in 1985. By the end of her career, Junge was ANR's Healthy Families and Communities Strategic Initiative leader and acting director of the UC 4-H Youth Development Program.
“As an emeritus advisor she continues to develop curricula for youth nutrition education and supports and mentors 4-H Youth Development academics and staff,” Horrillo said. “She continues to be a trusted colleague whose knowledge and expertise is valued and consulted.”
Most notably, Junge was a pioneer in afterschool programming, developing the first 4-H afterschool programs run by 4-H and Cooperative Extension in the nation and the largest California effort to reach more Latino youth in 4-H. More than 1,500 youth were reached annually in Placer and Nevada counties with a yearly budget of over $1.5 million.
Her state afterschool expertise led to her work at the national level on several projects, including director of one the 4-H Afterschool Centers for Action (1991-1995), and a member of the National Extension Network for Child Care Board (1995-1999), USDA's Extension CARES Initiative Steering Committee (1999-2003), the National School-age Editorial Board (2001-2002), and the Leadership Team for National 4-H Afterschool. She has written extensively on these projects and her curricula and evaluation findings are cited in many other works on afterschool programming. She authored other National Extension System afterschool resources such as Reaching Out to and Meeting the Needs of Diverse Audiences and Teens as Volunteer Leaders…Recruiting and Training Teens to Work with Younger Youth in Afterschool Programs and co-authored three other curricula with the National 4-H Leadership team that are used in 42 states.
Expanding on her 4-H afterschool work, Junge served as co-principal investigator for the multi-year Youth Experiences in Science project funded by the National Science Foundation ($980,000). As the 4-H Program Leader, she continued her efforts in afterschool and science education securing a grant to co-develop “Tools of the Trade I and II, Inspiring Young Minds to be SET Ready for Life,” which allowed 4-H to provide professional development to afterschool providers and enrich the experiences of nearly 114,000 youth statewide and countless more nationally.
With Junge's leadership, the 4-H SET Leadership Team launched the state's 4-H Science, Engineering, and Technology Initiative. She provided expertise to secure funding to develop the “There's No New Water!” curriculum, a five-year CYFAR project focused on science through gardening, and other SET projects, resources and training.
She also launched California's Healthy Living Initiative. In 2010, Junge secured a $1.2 million gift to strengthen the 4-H club program through 4-H Thrive, which integrated cutting-edge research on positive youth development and growth mindset. This gift resulted in youth leadership development projects that reached 8,500 youth and 2,000 adult volunteers who contributed 9,746 hours of volunteer service to their communities. The volunteer service is valued at $1,101,267, essentially doubling the value of the initial gift of this ongoing project.
During the ceremony, honorees were presented with a National 4-H Hall of Fame medallion, plaque and memory book.
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
Our Strategic Vision 2025 highlights the importance of accurate, science-based information as a cornerstone in personal decision-making and public policy. The improvement of scientific literacy among the public is a joint, collaborative responsibility shared by multiple ANR initiative groups. The 4-H Youth Development Program has made significant efforts developing and implementing high-quality curricula and programs to address youth scientific literacy, and there are further opportunities to bolster youth learning and involvement by engaging young people across the range of ANR strategic initiatives.
“We would like to expand our work with our colleagues in ANR across the initiatives and statewide programs,” said Martin Smith, UC Cooperative Extension science literacy specialist in Veterinary Medicine Extension and the Department of Human Ecology at UC Davis.
The 4-H Youth Development Program already partners with several strategic initiatives to improve the scientific literacy of youth by giving them authentic opportunities to learn science and do scientific work.
Sustainable Food Systems
Through nutrition and gardening projects, 4-H programs incorporate the Sustainable Food Systems Initiative to improve youth science literacy. The Discovering Healthy Choices curriculum developed through a 2011 ANR Grant is a multi-component, school-based approach to supporting regional agriculture, promoting healthy behaviors, and reducing childhood obesity. Terri Spezzano, UCCE Stanislaus County director and nutrition, family and consumer science advisor, says “Through the Discovering Healthy Choices curriculum, youth learn not only about the nutrition in foods we eat, but also about the connections with agriculture science, native plants and animals available for food; geography; and the variation of fruits and vegetables between countries and cultures. Youth also have the opportunity to grow and eat the produce they learn about. This gives them a well-rounded background in food systems, both local and worldwide.”
Water quality, quantity and security
Efforts are underway to bring water-focused programming to 4-H youth, with opportunities to learn about the water cycle, human interventions in the cycle, the rural-urban interface, and mapping watersheds, and then apply this knowledge through a service-learning project in their community. A variety of resources have been developed, including the There's No New Water! curriculum, to improve youth scientific literacy and at the same time engage youth in real-world issues right at home. Darren Haver, UCCE water quality advisor and director of South Coast REC and Orange County CE, says “The UC ANR Water Quality, Quantity, and Security Initiative Strategic Plan identifies a number of water-related issues facing California. ANR's ability to tackle these issues requires significant investment in research and extension to the citizens of the state. 4-H efforts to improve science literacy in the area of watershed science not only provides youth with the opportunity to engage in a critical local issue, it also expands UC ANR's reach to the youth who will be responsible for developing and implementing water policies in the future.”
Endemic and invasive pests and diseases
ANR has a history of supporting 4-H youth in animal science projects where they care for, breed, grow, show and market their products. A cross-initiative effort is underway to help 4-H youth develop biosecurity practices that will reduce the risk of disease spread. These efforts include publishing the Bio-Security in 4-H Animal Science curriculum, conducting research funded by a 2013 ANR grant (Mitigating Zoonotic and Animal Disease Risks in 4-H Animal Science Projects through Coordinated Education and Research), and planning the inaugural 2015 State Animal Science Symposium.
To get involved, contact your local 4-H youth development advisor and/or youth, families, and communities advisor or a member of the 4-H SET Leadership Team:
- Steven Worker, 4-H Science, Engineering, and Technology coordinator (smworker@ucanr.edu)
- Martin Smith, science literacy specialist (mhsmith@ucdavis.edu)
- Lynn Schmitt-McQuitty, county director and 4-H Youth Development advisor (lschmittmcquitty@ucanr.edu)
- Andrea Ambrose, Development Services (apambrose@ucanr.edu)