When Emily Black and her husband, Luke, started farming, they needed help.
“I went to the library and got every single farming book I could find, but that only takes you so far,” Emily says. “Then, there’s YouTube channels that you’re following, but they’re so generic. What about my area? What about my soil?”
To find those close-to-home answers, Emily turned to Annie’s Project at the University of Idaho Cooperative Extension.
Extensions services spread the mission of land-grant universities beyond campuses, reaching out to residents of all ages across America. Educational opportunities provided by extension services cover a wide range of topics, such as helping farmers grow crops and livestock, educating adults about gardening and health, and teaching youth hands-on skills.
University of Idaho Extension educator Colette DePhelps says Annie’s Project courses help women farm operators gain skills, manage risks and build professional networks. While participants have met in person in the past, recent sessions have been virtual—three hours weekly over 12 weeks.
Classes are structured to accommodate the realities of life.
“We know you are multitasking, and it’s fine,” Colette says. “It’s fine if your kids are on Zoom. It’s fine if you have to step away and come back. We totally understand. We’re a very welcoming class.”
Participants come from all scales of operations.
“Newer farmers are learning from farmers who have been farming for a long time,” Colette says. “But also, newer farmers have a different perspective, and they may be more comfortable with technology or direct marketing, so they have fresh ideas to share with more experienced farmers about reaching modern clientele.”
That was the case for Emily, who now teaches marketing strategy through the extension and offers one-on-one coaching through cultivatingyourmarket.com.
Annie’s Project is only one of a wide variety of courses offered through extensions. While 4-H youth development programs and Master Gardeners community gardening experts are well known, extensions across the country lead a host of other projects they’re excited about.
Inviting Kids Into the Kitchen
In Twin Falls County, Idaho, extension educator Siew Guan Lee leads Kids in the Kitchen, a live online cooking program co-launched with the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension in 2020.
“One of the goals is that kids are the chef, and they’re making the meal for the family that night,” Siew says.
She started out offering kid-trusted basics with healthy twists, such as baked chicken nuggets and mac and cheese with broccoli. Participants encouraged Siew to embrace diverse dishes, including offerings from Mexico, Japan, Hawaii, Thailand, Ireland and more. Inspired by a colleague in Georgia, Siew also offers Southern dishes.
“And, of course, we’re Idahoans,” she says. “So, potatoes. We have to have that featured.”
Though the program is intended for Idaho residents, Siew says children log in from Wyoming, Washington, Utah, Oregon, Colorado, California and even Canada. And they aren’t just learning nutrition and food prep skills. They’re bonding with their sous-chef parent assistants.
“Parents said in their feedback that it actually improved their family dynamics,” she says.
Sharing Nutrition Stories
Getting families involved in nutrition education was also one of the goals behind Washington State University-Chelan and Douglas Counties Extension’s Story Walk.
Extension director Margaret Viebrock says they teamed with Friends of the Library to select and dissect oversized nutritional picture books. They mounted pages on foamcore with English on one side and Spanish on the other, then took them on the road.
The first book was, “I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato,” which was set up at the Master Gardeners’ Tomato Gala, an annual sample fest where the community votes on which tomato varieties the Master Gardeners grow for the spring plant sale.
The story walk was a hit with families strolling through, reading and collecting prizes after a quiz at the end. The project won a regional award and has been duplicated in half a dozen other extension offices in the state.
The extension also teaches nutrition basics in schools so children “understand that food doesn’t come from the back of a grocery store,” Margaret says. “There’s actually a farmer out there who grows it.”
The mission continues in community gardens, where aspiring green thumbs of all ages can rent small plots for the summer with water, seeds and a few starter plants included.
Lessons get serious when it comes to food preservation. It’s not like baking cookies, Margaret explains. If you’re out of chocolate chips and you substitute raisins, it’s still a cookie.
“With canning and preserving food, you just can’t make a substitution and put it in a sealed jar and expect it to be safe,” she says. “Just because it’s on the internet doesn’t mean it’s right. It’s important to know the source of a recipe to make sure it’s safe to use.”
Preventing Diabetes
Saving lives is at the core of the Diabetes Prevention Program that University of Arizona Extension specialist Vanessa da Silva directs. The 12-month intensive course is targeted not at the 1 in 10 Americans who have diabetes but at the 1 in 3 who are prediabetic.
“We use the image of an iceberg,” Vanessa says. “What you can see above water are the people with diabetes. Underwater is this huge number of people that, if nothing changes, are very likely to progress to Type 2 diabetes. We’re trying to have an impact on that through extension.”
Participants in groups of 10 to 20 meet for 26 one-hour sessions over 12 months, starting weekly and easing toward monthly at the end. Lifestyle coach facilitators lead the sessions, but participants are encouraged to get involved.
“We really try to get people to work together and figure out for themselves,” Vanessa says. “What are the changes that they can make?”
Alfred McDonald of Tucson, Arizona, says he had “zero knowledge about diabetes” when he signed up for the program.
“I immediately started learning things out of the gate, like how to read a food label, carbohydrates, proteins, things like that,” he says.
Alfred lost 60 pounds, brought down his blood sugar and learned to manage his stress.
Exploring Through 4-H
Southern Nye County Extension educator Hayley Maio says her extension operates in an area short on youth programs.
“We focus a lot on 4-H and positive youth development programs to help fill that gap,” she says. “It’s really fun to work with the kids and see them learning and blossoming.”
Tapping volunteers with expertise in a variety of backgrounds, the Southern Nevada extension gives youngsters a taste of robotics, creative writing, art, sewing, baking, gardening and more.
“Whatever kids are looking for or their parents think might be of interest to them, we try to make it happen,” Hayley says. “I’m a firm believer in if somebody wants it, we can figure out how to make it happen. If you can dream it, we can do it.”
Southern Nye County’s Master Gardeners and other adult programs have found success with online education, but when it comes to 4-H, in-person is vital “because it’s a learn-by-doing, experiential learning, hands-on type of program,” Hayley says.
In Washington, Whitman County Extension Office Acting Director Michael Gaffney says if he had to pick just one program he’s excited about, it would be 4-H robotics. He says the program is a science, technology, engineering and mathematics—or STEM—recruitment tool for student engagement in the sciences.
Regional and national competitions are great, but Michael says the real proof of the program’s success is watching kids head off to college to study things like engineering.
“For us, that checks all the boxes for 4-H,” he says.
Life on the Tundra
Hands-on education is so important to the Bering Strait Region Cooperative Extension that students are flown in three to four times a year for the High Latitude Range Management Program—an offering assistant professor Jackie Hrabok says is among the extension’s coolest.
The Western Alaska extension serves residents of Nome and 15 Alaska Native villages in the surrounding 36,000 square miles. Most of the area’s population is Inuit, living in villages off the road system across the Seward Peninsula.
Students learn to manage free-range reindeer that live alongside musk ox, caribou, arctic and red foxes and grizzly bears. They learn how many animals can survive on the rangeland, their preferred diets and how to prevent illness in the animals.
“Interactions between people and animals and the land is all part of the hands-on experience in the classroom and in the field doing field work and learning what type of techniques are used currently to monitor animals and the health of the land,” Jackie says.
The extension also taps the talents of community elders who take students out in the summer and prepare them to learn about plants by having them close their eyes.
“We will taste all the leaves of a variety of species of plants on the tundra,” Jackie says.
Food preservation lessons are also vital as communities deal with seasonal shortages. Jackie explains what changes in weather or delays in supply flights can mean.
“Your little village grocery store, quite often, might not be stocked with the nutrition that you seek,” she says. “So, you go on the land and in the waters, and you bring it home.”
Agricultural Technology
Unlike other extensions tied to a single land-grant college, the University of California’s system taps talent and resources across all 10 University of California campuses while operating as its own entity. Brent Hales, associate vice president for research and cooperative extension, says extension advisers are on the ground throughout the state engaging with local governments, businesses, nonprofits and communities.
The extension operates nine research farms stretching from its borders with Oregon to Mexico. Newer agriculture projects step into the future with drones and robotics.
“We’re investing a lot of time, effort and resources into technology transfer and working with growers and companies to develop cutting-edge technologies,” Brent says. “We’re working with different community colleges and universities to engage both college and high school students in robotics competitions specifically designed to do workforce development to help kids see that they have a great future in agriculture, and they may not touch the dirt at all other than walking on it.”
The extension is also part of a disaster preparedness and resilience team launched in October to face “fire, flood, drought, you name it, climate, heat, human pandemic, animal pandemic, a whole litany,” Brent says.
Cooperative extensions provide practical resources and education, helping communities solve real-world challenges. Whether teaching kids to cook, supporting farmers or preserving local traditions, these programs build stronger, more resilient communities for the future.
Visit extension.org/find-cooperative-extension-in-your-state to find the cooperative extension in your state.
Origins of Extensions
Latin, Greek, rhetoric, history and mountains of memorization were all elements of the classical university education available to only an elite few Americans before the Civil War. Then, the nation’s education mission expanded on a path that resulted in the cooperative extension network.
- The Land-Grant College Act of 1862, called the Morrill Act for its sponsor, U.S. Rep. Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont, granted each state 30,000 acres of western land for each of its congressional seats to expand access to college education.
- In 1890, the second Morrill Act expanded the land-grant university funding system to the southern states. Native American tribal colleges were added with the Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act of 1994.
- In 1914, Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act, which established the Cooperative Extension Service. At the time the act was signed, more than 50% of the U.S. population lived in rural areas, and 30% of the workforce was engaged in farming, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
- Today, roughly 17% of Americans live in rural areas. University extensions have offices in or near most of the country’s approximately 3,000 counties.