A Case Study of Relevant Extension Programming: Grain Management in Low-Margin Years Meeting Series.

In 21^st century agricultural education, the traditional university Extension system has been challenged by private-industry competition to deliver management information to the modern farmer. University-based Extension has been pressured in recent years to compete with private entities to capture attention of the modern farmer to push locally-relevant, science-based information. This has demanded creativity and the use of social media outlets by Extension personnel to make sound information available. The University of Wisconsin-Madison Grains Team, made up of nine university-based Extension specialists across disciplines, recently used a multi-pronged approach to deliver a successful meeting series titled “Grain Management in Low-Margin Years.” The series utilized a four-page fact sheet, a 13-location winter meeting series, and developed a YouTube Channel where nine perennial videos were housed on the subject. There were 455 participants in the meetings with 245 of those participants returning surveys. Most of the attendees were farmers (79%) with a few lenders (12%), Ag/Chem industry personnel (8%), government employees (5%), consultants (4%), and other agribusiness personnel (4%) attending. The producers and non-producers managed 197,364 and 309,658 acres in total, respectively. The large majority (99%) of the respondents found the series relevant with 79% of the respondents intending to change their crop inputs in economically challenging times. More than 55% of respondents planned to change their marketing plans after utilizing the tools provided during the series. Further, impact of the series was noted with 94% indicating that it would help them increase profitability in challenging times, while 56% felt the series helped to alleviate some of their stress pertaining to operating their farm. The fact sheet and YouTube were found to be quite useful with 1,168 video views and over 500 copies of the fact sheet disseminated, at the time this abstract was written.