Academic partnership created successful video series

Ten of the top 20 videos on the UC ANR YouTube channel were developed by a team of California professors and researchers assembled by UCCE specialist Jeff Mitchell to encourage young people to pursue careers in agriculture.

Views of those 10 videos total more than 600,000 since the series was released in 2019. The complete playlist has 27 videos, which together have garnered many more thousands of views.

UCCE specialist Jeff Mitchell shoots footage for one of the videos in the "Training the Next Generation of California Vegetable Producers" series.

The production team included academics from UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, UC Davis, Chico State, Fresno State and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. They received financial support from the CDFA Specialty Crops Block Grant Program.

The team initiated a hybrid plan in which the universities recorded the video themselves, then sent the footage to a professional video producer who edited and narrated each of the videos.

The videos depict state-of-the-art technologies and techniques that are in use in many production regions of California today, vegetable farming systems used in other parts of the world, and increasingly popular cottage farming systems that are popping up in urban areas for easy access to healthful foods.

“We believed that this series of videos on vegetable production would have broad interest,” Mitchell said. “We are now realizing the importance of video in our work. These videos, plus our other CASI Workgroup videos on conservation agriculture topics and the ones that we have at our own You Tube channel have started to tally up some rather impressive viewer numbers. That is nice to see.”

The full series is on a playlist titled “Training of a New Generation of California Vegetable Producers,” https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLjlfxpbNglYF2m7tvApfiR5NXParpvGP

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