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Agroecology

Tending the seeds of the new growth economy...

   The biggest challenge facing UMass Extension is no longer the specter of failure hanging over the state’s farmers, according to Jay Healy, Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Food and Agriculture.

   The big challenge, he says — particularly for Extension’s Agroecology Program — is the changing face of agricultural success.

   Healy is in a unique position to comment on Massachusetts farming, and on the Agroecology Program’s role in providing support to the state’s growers: he is a farmer from the town of Charlemont; he is a former state legislator serving the rural towns of western Franklin County; and he is a member of Extension’s Board of Public Overseers. Perhaps most significantly, however, he is outspoken in his belief that Extension still has critical ground to cover in its attempt to meet the rapidly changing needs of what has become one of the strongest sectors of the state’s economy.

   Pointing to U.S. Census of Agriculture data recently analyzed by the University’s Donahue Institute, Healy says more Massachusetts farms are more profitable than ever before.  “The old myths about the ‘old farm’ going under don’t have anything to do with the reality of the year 2000,” he says.  “We have some real entrepreneurs out there doing very, very well, thank you.”

   That census shows that:

• net farm income in Massachusetts in 1997 hit an all-time high, as the state placed fourth in the nation in net income per acre;
  
• farm land actually increased between 1992 and 1997 in five Massachusetts counties;
  
• agricultural sales increased by more than a third between 1987 and 1997, with major advances in sales of fruits and berries, nursery and greenhouse crops, and vegetables.

   The secret to that success, says Healy, has been the ability of Massachusetts farmers to buck national trends.While  “fewer and larger” farms has been the rule nationally, Massachusetts has seen a dramatic increase in the number of small farming operations. Even more important, however, has been the success of Massachusetts farmers in tapping consumer dollars. Nationally, 85 percent of agricultural products are sold to the wholesale market. In Massachusetts, 85 percent goes straight from the farm to the retail shelf. And Massachusetts leads the nation in direct marketing.

    “Farmers have learned that they need to deal with the consumer directly, and they’ve learned how to earn the consumer dollar, rather than 20 cents on the dollar,” said Healy.

   That’s the good news.

   The challenge for Extension is that agricultural success has created a whole new set of needs, says Healy. Top-notch research is more important to agriculture than ever before, and timely information can be critical in a rapidly changing global economy. Extension is faced with new demands for service and for direct contact, but struggles to do so without the many county Extension agents who served the state’s farms a decade ago. Healy points to several of Agroecology’s teams — including Integrated Pest Management, Tree Fruit, Vegetables/Small Fruit, Turf, and Nursery and Landscape — as being particularly successful in getting badly needed information to growers.

    “But Extension has to figure out new ways of getting that good solid information out to our farmers without the help of a lot of those people who have historically done that transfer, and new ways of getting information to flow from some of your research and faculty people to the people who use it.”

   Part of the answer, says Healy, lies in rebuilding the Extension staff by as much as 15 percent, a move that he believes the legislature would support. Part of the answer may also lie with making outreach work as rewarding as teaching for faculty members. And part of the answer may lie in specializing — boosting the most successful Agroecology programs at the expense of the least successful. But the most important strategy, says Healy, lies in forming new partnerships, even if that means going outside the traditional Extension role in a land grant university.

    “We have to be become increasingly sophisticated in accessing resources at the University that might or might not be under Extension. We need to figure out how to re-establish those ties and get services that might be provided by the University as a whole, but might not be defined any longer within the Extension mission.” Massachusetts farmers need and deserve the kind of support and recognition from the University that other sectors of the advanced state economy receive, insists Healy. He notes that many farmers are Stockbridge School of Agriculture graduates, and remain fiercely loyal to the land-grant university. And unlike leaders of other successful businesses in the state, they aren’t about to bolt:

    “They aren’t going to move to Dallas,” says Healy  “They’re tied to 600,000 acres of land.”