Extension Update: October 2004 Archives

UNH Cooperative Extension's Family, Home & Garden Education Center Info Line answered 35,000 calls in the last five years! The Education Center volunteers, highly trained Master Gardeners, provide research-based information on a wide variety of questions from homeowners. In those five years, 221 Education Center Master Gardeners volunteered a total of 13,418 hours.

Categories range from annuals to wildlife and include questions about child development, food safety, backyard livestock, ponds, vegetables and weeds, to name a few. There are 24 categories of questions, and the top five remain constant. The most frequently asked questions focus on trees and shrubs, household insects, annuals and perennials, lawns and wildlife.

This past year, the top category was "trees and shrubs," an indication that home landscaping interests are growing, generating lots of questions, and lawn concerns made up the third biggest category. For this reason, the Center coordinator and entomologist, Rachel Maccini, expanded the Info Line training to include more information.

This fall a presentation about Urban Pest Control updated Master Gardener trainees about new control methods for termites, ants and household pests. IPM, pond maintenance, water quality, mold and mildew, new insects to New Hampshire, and forest entomology are other topics covered in the expanded training schedule.

Peg Boyles continues to work with center staff to update fact sheets. More and more fact sheets are available on our web site, providing instant information to callers who are on-line. The center can also provide information to callers without web connections through their home fax machines.

Education Center Director Margaret Hagan’s topical shows on WMUR-TV generated 445 calls this year for further information, indicating the public’s interest. The center also provides classroom space for unique and interesting evening workshops taught by Master Gardeners. In the last two years, Master Gardeners conducted 32 evening and weekend workshops for 291 participants.

Anne Krantz, involved since the Center opened, says, “The Center opened just five years ago and undergoes constant tuning to provide even faster and more efficient answers to ever tougher questions. From our humble start with a class of 30 recruits, we have become a state-of-the-art operation, respected by other states. We who were in the first class remember our anxiety about our ability to do such sophisticated work - to simultaneously use the computers to quickly enter information and to do searches while talking to the callers.

In class we worried about the Y-2K scare and anticipated questions about disasters – how long could water be kept in plastic jugs? When we graduated and began to staff the Ed Center we were swamped! I remember having six or seven pending questions, and fearing that I would get the answer to the wrong client. But it was so exciting – it seems like another century now! We expected calls about gardening topics that we were comfortable with – what flowers to plant where. But as Ed Center volunteers now know, that hardly ever happens, the questions are usually very difficult."

As more and more people become aware of the resources offered by the Family, Home & Garden Education Center, its outreach efforts grow. It’s a winner for all involved, including the volunteers who gain knowledge, satisfaction and self-esteem, the staff, who can now focus on program impacts elsewhere, New Hampshire residents, who gain valuable education, and UNH Cooperative Extension, which gains as a whole through increased visibility.

If you're interested in finding out specifics, tailor your own report at the Family, Home and Garden Education Center site.

President Ann Hart met October 27 with the Legislative Committee to Study the Establishment of a Farm Viability Program. You might be interested in reviewing the four attachments she discussed with the committee:

President Hart's testimony
State & UNH Funding for Extension for the past 5 years
Ten year funding trends for Extension
Agriculture Specialist staffing since 1987

Legislators are very complimentary regarding the work of Extension staff. There is a heightened awareness across the state of the need for resources to keep pace with increasing clientele demands. Now, we can only hope those appropriation increases are forthcoming at a time when government at all levels is experiencing extraordinary fiscal challenges.

Existing and new revenue streams are essential if we are to continue to respond with relevant programming as we fulfill the mission of "...providing NH citizens with research-based education and information, enhancing their ability to make informed decisions that strengthen youth, families, and communities, sustain natural resources, and improve the economy..."

Thanks for the outstanding work that each of you do and please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. For further information regarding the Farm Viability Committee, please refer to the previous Extension Update posting of September 28.

The fourth annual Soul of Agriculture conference takes place November 7-9 on the University of New Hampshire campus. The three-day conference, "Healthy Farms, Healthy People: Making the Agriculture-Nutrition Link," explores how healthy nutrition and healthy agriculture can be integrated to establish common goals across farm, food and health communities.

The conference will include:
Panel sessions on institutional purchasing, sustainable cuisine and food security issues,
Plenary sessions including the role of media in communicating with the public on the important issues of nutrition, agriculture and health,
Keynote speakers including Ron Jager, Ph.D., author of the recently published book, The Fate of Family Farming: Variations on an American Ideal, and Wil Bullock, Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Fellow and Kitchen and Outreach Associate at the Food Project.

Register for the entire conference and save $25. The fee is $95, with individual rates of $30 for November 7, $50 for November 8 and $40 for November 9.

Information is available at the UNH Office of Sustainability's website or by calling 603-862-5040.

The statewide UNH Cooperative Extension Conference takes place Tuesday, May 17, 2005 at the Memorial Union Building (MUB) on the UNH Durham campus.

This conference is for all Extension staff across the state. This is similar to conferences held in Concord in 2002 and 2003, focusing on professional development and recognition of Extension staff.

New Hampshire is rich with strong communities, supported by many outstanding individuals and organizations. Bringing a community together and encouraging others to get involved is a challenging task. The University of New Hampshire's Community Development program wants to recognize these efforts by awarding the UNH Community Leader of the Year awards. These awards go to individuals and organizations that strengthen communities around the state. Nominations are due November 5.

These awards include:
NH Community Leader of the Year
UNH Student Community Leader of the Year ($1,000 scholarship)
NH Community-Supporting Organization of the Year
UNH Campus Organization of the Year ($200 grant)

The Leadership Team will select a staff nominee for the Northeast Extension Director's Award of Excellence at its November 9th meeting. Please submit nominations to your Program Leader prior to that date.

To learn more about this award visit the staff recognition web page on our
Intranet.

Rebecca Grube accepted the position of Extension Faculty and Sustainable Horticulture Production Specialist in the Department of Plant Biology. Becky currently works for USDA Agricultural Research Service at the Crop Improvement and Protection Station in Salinas, CA, where she developed a lettuce breeding and genetics research program.

Her background includes doctoral work in plant genetics at Cornell University. She comes from a farm in Vermont and completed her undergraduate work at Dartmouth College. Her research is strongly field-oriented, building strong ties with both growers and the vegetable industry. Although her primary work at ARS was research-oriented, she is committed to outreach and education. She found numerous opportunities to engage in educational service, including work with a volunteer mentoring program for minority women.

Throughout her childhood and undergraduate life, she was actively involved with all aspects of a diversified and profitable family farm that included maple sugaring, greenhouse and bedding plant production, and floral and vegetable crop production using a variety of marketing venues.

Becky will be a great addition to our staff. As well as strong skills and experience, she is coming home to New England and understands the agriculture and the farming communities well. Her start date for UNH Cooperative Extension is in late December, early January. Welcome, Becky!

The Leadership Team has met several times to discuss the PAST recommendations and how best to implement them. I hope you'll take a moment to become familiar with the implementation plans added to each recommendation.

Several action steps are now complete, including the hiring of Juli Brussell as the new Agricultural Resources Program Leader, putting the new performance
management documents in place for Extension Educators, and setting initial dates and guidelines for program area reviews. Feel free to contact Leadership Team members for more information.

Congratulations to Marilyn Sullivan, Deb Maes and Shirley LeBlanc for earning second place in the Educational Technology Awards category, Eastern Region, from the National Association of Extension Family and Consumer Sciences.

The awards were announced at the NAEFCS annual meeting in Nashville on October 6. The award recognized their adaptation of "Who Gets Grandma's Yellow Pie Plate" into a PowerPoint program. The program gives an overview of the process of transferring personal property, adapted from the University of Minnesota curriculum.

UNH Cooperative Extension is launching a new initiative called GIS Mapping of Social Assets. The program’s first goal is to determine how communities and socially oriented organizations/agencies around the state could effectively access and use information about community and regional social assets. These could include meeting places, educational institutions, local and regional associations, cultural and historic resources and available human services. The initiative’s ultimate goal is to determine how to develop a GIS-based website that more easily identifies and locates statewide social resources on a map.

For many years, New Hampshire’s conservation community, consisting primarily of non-profit and public agencies, used GIS data and software to accelerate conservation activities within the state and across the region. An increasing availability of natural resource GIS data, coupled with advanced training opportunities, helped conservation organizations analyze the relationships between resources and land uses. In turn, this helped conservation groups educate communities about the importance of integrating natural resource data when making important land use decisions.

UNH Cooperative Extension was instrumental in spreading GIS technology to the conservation community by providing GIS training and assistance. As an example, programs such as GIS for Community Decision-Makers helped communities identify conservation areas to help advocate effectively for their protection.

Despite advances in mapping and analyzing natural resource data using GIS, other fields haven’t used GIS technology in their decision-making processes. In particular, social/health service providers, community development organizations, youth/elderly advocates, and others had limited access to GIS-enabled data that pertains directly to their specialties.

Extension’s initiative will help develop a comprehensive, web-based system that helps communities and organizations feed information on community-level and/or regional-level social assets to a statewide database. They will then be able to locate various social assets categories on a map through this web-based database. With the new GIS-based website, users will zoom in to the appropriate geographic scale with regard to a particular asset(s).

To implement the initiative, the first step is to study the technology opportunities, barriers and issues related to creation of a social assets database. Such assets might include the location of teen centers, safe houses and public meeting spaces. To gather this information, a series of focus groups will take place around the state to determine what social asset data groups maintain, what data they would find useful, and how their data is stored.

Once a range of social assets is identified and the data structure maintained by various stakeholders analyzed, the next step is to determine how to deliver the information through the Internet using GIS. The information provided by stakeholders will help frame development of a web-based repository that readily provides access to information on statewide assets and displays the information in map form. Each social asset will link to information about that asset, such as the physical address/location, the nature of the asset and accessibility.

The database will also help communities understand the important interrelationships between the various social assets they maintain and spawn a better understanding and use of existing assets. Extension staff involved in the initiative are Charlie French, Charlotte Cross, Michele Gagne and Brad Anderson, who works on contract with Extension on GIS education.

Now that we've survived the October 1 plan of work deadline, it is time to
prepare for performance appraisals. You'll find timelines and forms on our
Intranet site.

It is important that all staff provide feedback on their peers, supervisors, team leaders and team members. Feel free to contact members of the Leadership Team if you have questions. Thanks to all staff who helped design and pilot the new appraisal forms for educators.

Staff seeking reimbursement for travel and other expenses through the BSC for August, September and October must submit them by October 29. This includes grant-sponsored programs. Timeliness enhances management of our budget deficit. Thanks for observing this important deadline.

Kathy Becker Blease becomes the Extension Specialist for Family Education and Policy on October 11. Kathy joins Cooperative Extension after working at the UNH Family Research Laboratory/Crimes Against Children Research Center since June, 2002, as a Research Associate.

Kathy earned a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Oregon. Her dissertation was "Attention and Traumatic Stress in Children." Kathy will hold a split appointment with 80 percent of her responsibilities with Cooperative Extension and 20 percent in the Department of Family Studies, School of Health and Human Services. Her office will be in Pettee Hall. Welcome Kathy!

The Forestry and Wildlife Program staff and the Natural Resource Conservation Service now work under a new agreement to provide forest owners with technical and financial assistance.

Under this agreement, staff from both agencies will work with landowners to promote forest conservation and develop and implement Farm Bill forestry contracts, primarily through the Environmental Quality Incentive Program. This agreement also provides for education and outreach by Extension Educators in Forest Resources. NRCS will provide Extension with $30,000 for its part in this effort.

According to Program Leader Bob Edmonds, "NRCS and Extension have a common mission of encouraging good forest stewardship in New Hampshire, making this a great partnership".

A recent congressional briefing summary titled The Public Health Effects of Sprawl describes what might seem like a no-brainer to many Extension staff across program areas: sprawling communities contribute to the chronic diseases of the 21st century - high blood pressure, obesity and asthma. It seems our vehicle (rather than pedestrian)-friendly development patterns contribute to an increase in automobile use, a reduction in physical activity and therefore, an increase in obesity rates and respiratory illnesses.

The briefing mentions studies that help establish the connection between the built environment and health concerns, such as studies connecting motor vehicle pollution and respiratory diseases, increasing rates of vehicle travel and increasing rates of obesity, BMIs of people living in sprawling communities versus more compact communities and links between urban form, physical activity and obesity.

Obesity is a serious health concern in both effects and costs. According to data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity may soon overtake tobacco as the leading preventable cause of death. It already exceeds smoking in health care costs, but there is relatively little public policy designed to combat obesity compared to reducing tobacco smoking.

Dr. Reid Ewing of the National Center for Smart Growth, who published a study in the American Journal of Health Promotion (Sept./Oct. 2003) demonstrating a clear relationship between urban form, physical activity and obesity in the United States, suggests the following ways to reduce sprawling land use patterns and get people more active in daily life.
The suggestions include:
* Increasing community densities
* Connecting streets and shortening blocks
* Mixing land uses (i.e. residential, commercial and institutional)
* Strengthening city centers, and
* Building complete streets that provide safe and convenient travel for people on foot and bicycles.

The briefing points to the need for planning professionals, transportation experts and public health officials to work together to help communities improve their health through better community planning. In Extension, we might be wise to look carefully as this data and keep it in mind as we work with communities on their visions, their land use and their health. It may be the ultimate interdisciplinary project!

Read the full briefing for more information.