- Author: Wendy Powers
I noticed the Davis skeleton was welcoming visitors to the building again this morning, after having spent some time in the elevator and on the exercise bike. The skeleton appears to now be waiting for a meeting to begin. I am a bit fearful that the skeleton is a past employee who suffered the effects of too many meetings. I feel that way myself at times. While the meetings themselves are important, the tradeoff is that while I am giving my full attention to the meeting topic, I'm not answering emails or getting projects completed, leaving those items to early morning, noon time, evening, and/or weekend hours. Fortunately, it is a small price to pay to be part of UC ANR and a part of the important brainstormings, discussions, and celebrations of the great work across the state.
Yesterday I was in Napa for their annual luncheon with the county. I really liked how that brief, <2 hr meeting is used to share with the county Board of Supervisors, CEO, and department heads the highlights of the work in an informal way. It's a great opportunity to thank the county for their partnership in UCCE and arm the county with good information about how the county's investment is translating to important outcomes for county residents. David referred to it as their way of providing a live annual report.
Today is a rare day when I have just a couple of meetings, allowing time to catch up on yesterday's email and the ‘to do' list as well as rest up for a full day of meetings on Friday. It's odd that the week seems a bit slow Tues-Thurs but back-to-back with things all day each of Monday and Friday.
Saturday is the Orange County Farm Bureau/UC ANR steak fry. I like the idea of attending for the third consecutive year because I have a chance to reconnect with partners, supporters, volunteers, and clientele that I don't normally see when I am at South Coast. In addition, I have a chance to say hi to the South Coast team. It makes for a quick trip, but long enough that I can get out of yard work for the weekend.
- Author: Wendy Powers
Tuesday afternoon I headed to Des Moines to participate in the Borlaug Dialogue and World Food Prize events. After my customary travel delays, I rose early yesterday, with only a couple hours of sleep, to attend a breakfast meeting/discussion with the 2018 Borlaug Laureates on the topic of agriculture and nutrition. The statistics presented were alarming, in both positive and negative ways:
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A $1 USD investment in nutrition leads to an economic return of $8 to $138 due to improved health outcomes
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According to the director of nutrition at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a person in Nigeria in the 4th income quintile, would spend 44% of their income to purchase an egg every day, and
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For the third consecutive year, global hunger has not declined. In fact, it has increased the last 2 years.
If you're not familiar with the Borlaug Dialogue International Symposium, it is an annual meeting to honor Norm Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution' and his work to end world hunger. I've attended regularly since my days at Iowa State. A couple of things have always surprised me. One is the small number of scientists that I have recognized over the years. The other is the lack of presence from California. These are changing, a bit. The Feed the Future Innovation Labs meet at this event now, increasing the presence of scientists. And this year, the California presence was a bit stronger. Beth Mitcham was present, perhaps due to her connection with an Innovation Lab. Also, Helene Dillard is a panelist tomorrow, talking about women leading food and agriculture research. A.G. Kawamura is here as well and was a panelist during yesterday's morning session.
I really enjoyed A.G.'s comments. He talked about his farming operation, pointing out that he is in his 40th year this year and referencing Howard Buffet's book, which I would highly recommend even for non-readers like myself. A.G.'s comments were really focused on the feasibility of farming small parcels of land owned by airports, churches, cities, etc., pointing out efforts in the area of built environments. A.G. also talked about opportunities to farm specifically for food banks, in his case working with an FFA chapter. I noticed he attended one of the side events this morning. The topic was vertical agriculture and the speaker was the owner of Skyscraper Farm. The speaker shared the company's work with Virginia Tech on an NSF INFEWS project. The company holds 2 utility patents on the building design, focused on getting light in. They envision as tall as a 52 story building (200' x 200') with 5 floors of condos, 5 floors of commercial space, a ground floor farmers market and 41 floors of growing space. An interesting concept and clearly vertical, compared to other indoor agriculture units that still have a large footprint because they don't build up.
What interested me most in the conversation was the concept of ‘speed breeding' to achieve desirable traits much faster than traditional breeding allows and even further acceleration in indoor growing environments. I need to read up on this a bit but definitely something where CA should be at the forefront.
Still more to learn before I head back.
- Author: Wendy Powers
Last week I visited the last of the counties, at least for my ‘initial' visit. It took a bit longer than I had hoped but California is a big state and things always seem to crop up on my calendar. Then there's a list of ‘standing meetings' like Program Council, VP Council, REC calls, CD calls, Executive Council not to mention staff meetings in 2 offices, Core Leadership, Senior Leadership, Ethics and Compliance meetings. So when I realized this morning that I have no open days in November and very few in December I really shouldn't be surprised. Even some of the UCOP holidays seem to get booked over (Veterans Day, for example).
Also of no surprise is the comment I've heard all around the state that our visits are a rare opportunity for all of the county team to come together and learn about the programs and accomplishments of their peers. I suspect that was the case for the Yolo, Solano, Sacramento group we met with last Thursday as well as the Placer-Nevada team that we saw on Friday. I heard from many that peer networking was one of the highlights of the 2018 statewide conference as well; an opportunity to see each other in an environment that had both structured and unstructured time. Time, maybe more so than funds, is what prevents all of us from connecting more. Everyone is running in many different directions in order to contribute to the greatest extent possible.
Contribution by UC ANR has also been a regular theme of my conversations around the state. In Placer-Nevada I learned that, in part due to the work of the team:
- 86% of orchard growers now mulch their orchards (up from 18% in 2005)
- 90% of orchard growers now prune
- 90% of the repeat business training participants are profitable compared to only 24.8% of respondents to the 2012 Ag Census,
- UCCE has an economic multiplier effect of 1.86 and helps contribute to the 29.2 jobs produced for every $1 mill in ag production
The first two bullet points, above, contribute to the change in conditions that are conveyed in the last two bullet points. So how does one gather the information to document change in practices/behaviors? These questions came up during our visit to the Capitol Corridor team as well as during visits with other areas of the state. Cindy can share how she collected the data, above. For similar programs, periodic survey data to growers or grower groups, or even observation by a CE Advisor may work when the grower group is small. Gathering data from CCAs, PCAs or a commodity organization are another means of gathering data. Note that the change in behaviors for mulching reflect a 13-year timespan, suggesting that one doesn't want to collect data monthly or even quarterly. In this case, there was likely research that took place over years to document effectiveness followed by communication (meetings, newsletters, blogs, one-on-one consultations) to promote adoption. That all, collectively, and with likely additional influences (price of mulch, availability of mulch, testimonials from grower colleagues, etc.) has resulted in behavior change. Likely, the science supports use of mulch as a strategy to reduce input costs, improving overall profitability. If the grower also participates in the business training classes, they are even more likely to be profitable (class surveys compared to Ag Census data) and result in more jobs to stimulate the local economy.
As we discussed in Woodland, I think there would be real value to having a chance to have unstructured time to brainstorm how we document our contribution to improved conditions. And then there's the added benefit of that chance to just network.
- Author: Wendy Powers
You might think that Tu Tran is smiling because this week is his birthday and he's expecting a big surprise party. Nope. He's smiling because he and Greg Gibbs were part of a ceremony to celebrate a UC ANR Presidential Endowed Researcher at the Lindcove REC, made possible by a generous donation from the Citrus Research Board and matched by the President's office. Great work everyone! I'm looking forward to identifying the first holder of the endowment.
That's not all that Beth Grafton-Cardwell has to smile about. Her webinar-based training was called out by Western Farm Press and then re-run in UCOP's Daily News Clips yesterday. Thanks to Jeannette for sharing this information with the media! This group is doing things differently to meet clientele needs. According to Jim Farrar, this is the first of three pest management webinars available to clientele for continuing education credits required by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation. Beth Grafton Cardwell is conducting two of the trainings (citrus thrips in October and Fuller rose beetle in December). Ben Faber is conducting the third, avocado diseases, to be offered in November.
In addition to the 46 position proposals, I've done a little bit of reading this week. Adina Merenlender shared an article about ‘boundary organizations', such as Extension, and how to evaluate the work of these organizations (Pitt et al., 2018 in Conservation Biology). From the paper: "... boundary organizations face the challenging task of demonstrating their value to diverse stakeholders...Although no off-the-shelf solution is available for a given boundary organization, we identified 4 principles that will support effective evaluation for boundary organizations:engage diverse stakeholders, support learning and reflection, assess contribution to change, and align evaluation with assumption and values." These all sound familiar, with at least two of the 4 principles, core to what I think we regularly consider indicators for UC ANR. That's something to smile about.
The other reading I've done was a document someone left on my desk that provided 4 strategies to avoid overworking high performing employees: 1) Refrain from asking high performers to help on small efforts, 2) Let high performers occasionally pick their projects, 3) Create high-performing pairs of employees at similar levels, and 4) Keep track of additional demands on their time and consider micromanaging what high performers are allowed to say ‘yes' to. Given no context I don't know what to read into the anonymous gesture although I do wonder if the sender questioned whether or not they should enter my office, uninvited, versus leaving the document in Joan's box with my name on it.
Here's hoping that next time someone leaves me lottery tickets or a dark chocolate mint truffle (smile)!
- Author: Wendy Powers
I think most of us, if not all, have realized that we need to do things differently in order to really achieve the intent of the Morrill Act; improving the lives of all state residents by providing access to formal and informal education. We're not alone. In talking with the Extension directors from a number of states last week, it seems to be a common theme. One of our Western neighbors has an upcoming annual conference where the theme is ‘fail fast'. This refers to the concept of ideation where you develop ideas and quickly test them on a small scale so that you can determine what may and may not work before making a large investment of time and/or money only to find that the idea doesn't work. UC ANR will be trying this out at an ideation workshop in late November. I look forward to seeing what ideas emerge to help us think about how we continue to provide the impactful programming and research we always have in a changing environment. To get a glimpse of some of the innovative approaches to Extension that are going on around the U.S. take a look at the current issue of the Journal of Extension.
I talked with the director in Iowa as well. I knew that Iowa had a standardized formula for county support of Extension, unlike many states, including CA. The formula is that each of the 99 counties directs 2.7% of collected property tax to Extension. That equates to $830k in support from Polk County (Des Moines) for FY18/19. The Polk County budget is $276M for FY18/19. Compare that to the numbers I heard when we were in LA a week+ ago ($475k for Extension out of a $28B county budget). I don't think LA is unusual for counties in CA. But Iowa is considering change. Following a 2009 budget reduction, all of the county contributions remained with the counties and all employees paid from those funds became county employees. As a result, the sense is that there is a weakened connection between the county and campus. That then weakens the ability to connect the general public to science; a pillar of what led to the creation of Extension.
I thought of LA County, among other counties, during conversations last week about urban extension. The general sense was that Extension is well positioned to do this around the country because we are grounded in our mission to serve the people of the state, aligned in vision and values with urban populations, and positioned to lead locally. Sound familiar? It should as these are the elements of the UC ANR promise. A key topic identified as relevant to an urban audience was green infrastructure was a focus. I envisioned Darren's demonstrations at the Orange County UCCE/SCREC that illustrate the principles of green infrastructure well. And, having just been back to the LA UCCE office I thought about Siavash and his program that works closely with the LA Housing Authority. My take away - we've got this as it's been a part of UC ANR for quite some time now. That doesn't mean we couldn't do it better. Given that continuous improvement is one of our core values, we must constantly seek better ways to do more, more efficiently and more effectively.
Now I really need to get to the position proposals.