2003 Extension Annual Report

Kentucky’s economic development, health issues, need for youth opportunities, and a rapidly changing agricultural landscape require a vital Cooperative Extension Service (CES) program. This report provides an overview of how our programs in fiscal year 2003 made a difference. Our programming for farmers in 2003 didn't stop at the farm gate—it also included education about processing and marketing. We worked with other types of industries and home-based businesses, too, and worked to develop leaders and educate consumers.

The University of Kentucky Cooperative Extension Service received more than $69 million in funding for the fiscal year 2003.

	11% GRANTS, GIFTS & CONTRACTS $7,425,157
	33% COUNTY $22,870,581
	16% FEDERAL $10,872,109
	40% STATE $28,029,389

Income Includes External Funding

In fiscal 2003 (July 1, 2002-June 30, 2003), 11% of Extension's $69 million in funding was from external grants, gifts, and contracts. It included approximately:

• $5.1 million for programs led by Extension specialists (much of this amount is also reported as part of annual reports for the Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station).
• $700,000 in funding from the private, non-profit Friends of Kentucky 4-H Foundation (a private, non-profit fund development partner of the Kentucky Cooperative Extension Service) and other gifts and endowments.
• $1.6 million obtained by counties for support of county programs.
  

Program Highlights

The state’s farmers, with CES assistance, are working cooperatively to infuse Kentucky agriculture with entrepreneurship (something that starts early through 4-H Youth Development).

In CES, we too are becoming more entrepreneurial as we seek to be wise stewards of the public funding supporting extension. We are working to multiply those funds for broader support for the needs Kentuckians face. For every state dollar spent on CES programs, an additional $1.50 is matched from other sources. For every county dollar provided, more than $2 is matched from other sources.

Partnerships with other groups and agencies multiply our efforts. Some of our partnerships in 2003 included:

• Strategic planning and visioning programs with Garrard County Tomorrow, Maysville Chamber of Commerce, Green County Chamber of Commerce, Wolfe County Renaissance, Jackson County Empowerment Zone, and Kentucky Fairs and Festivals.
• Agritourism programming with the West Kentucky Development Corporation, the Kentucky Cabinet for Tourism, and the Kentucky Tourism Council.
  
• The Women in Agriculture program with Kentucky State University, Kentucky Department of Agriculture, Kentucky Small Business Development Center, USDA Rural Development, USDA Farm Service Agency, Partners for Family Farms, Kentucky Farm Bureau Women, Kentucky Cattlemen's Association, and the Kentucky Soybean Association.
• All Wild about Kentucky's Environment, a partnership to develop a Web site and educational programming with the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources and the Kentucky Department of Education.
• Research-based information for producers about alternative horticultural crops with the Kentucky Horticulture Council, the Kentucky Agricultural Development Board, and the UK New Crop Opportunities Center.
• Assistance for the state’s beef producers to improve quality and markets with the Kentucky Agricultural Development Board, the Kentucky Beef Network, USDA, and the Kentucky Department of Agriculture.
• Health education programming including Health Education through Extension Leadership (HEEL), Rural Healthworks, and health camps for fourth and fifth graders. Our partners in one or more of these programs include USDA, the Kentucky School of Public Health, Area Health Education Centers, the UK Center of Excellence in Rural Health, the Kentucky State Office of Rural Health, and Kentucky State University Cooperative Extension Programs.
• Energy Star educational programming with the Kentucky Division of Energy and UK Colleges of Engineering, Design, and Business and Economics.
• Children’s environmental health education and outreach with Kentucky State University, Kentucky Division for Air Quality, Kentucky Department of Agriculture, Kentucky Regional Poison Center, and the Kentucky Environmental Quality Commission.

We are proud to have worked with you in 2003, and we look forward to the future.

Larry W. Turner, Associate Director
Cooperative Extension Service
S-107 Agricultural Science Center
University of Kentucky
Lexington, Kentucky 40546-0091

E-mail: larry.turner@uky.edu

For more information about the Cooperative Extension Service, contact the Associate Director or log on to
http://ces.ca.uky.edu/ces/

Extension by the Numbers in 2003

We made more than 6.5 million contacts in 2003. That number included 225,000 young people who took part in 4-H activity during the year. We ranked only behind Texas and New York in total 4-H enrollment.

• $22 million in additional income was realized by Kentucky farmers who adopted new practices.
• 48,000 people gained leadership skills.
• 31,000 people made lifestyle changes to improve their health.
• 21,000 people took steps to reduce their debt or increase savings.
• 67,000 youth learned new life skills.
• 22,000 individuals adopted practices to improve the quality of Kentucky's water.
  

Program Emphasis
Extension programming in six major categories is supported by faculty and staff on campus in Lexington, at the Research and Education Center in Princeton, at Robinson Station in Quicksand, and in each of Kentucky’s 120 counties.

Here’s how we spent our time in fiscal 2003:

	5% Environment
	20% Life Skills
	18% Diet & Health
	16% Leadership
	29% Agriculture
	12% Community

Annual Report stories

by Martha Jackson

Across Kentucky, farmers and their families are finding new ways to sustain
the rural way of life. As the state moves beyond a tobacco-based farm economy,
our entrepreneurs are determined to make their new enterprises work, whether they be
cooperatives, agritourism, home-based businesses, or something else. The Cooperative Extension Service is playing a role in their success and in grooming the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

Keeping More of
the Cattle Business at Home

When he retired from the Community Trust Bank in Campbellsville, Ed Rogers could have propped up his feet on the porch rail. Instead, in 2001 he and eight other Green County farmers took a dream to Frankfort.

“Our goal was to economically feed and market cattle to the consumer directly,” said Rogers. The Kentucky Agricultural Development Board liked the sound of that and gave what had by then become the Green River Cattle Co. a matching grant of $43,000. The group used the money to help prove that the state can capture much more of the industry dollar—that cattle can be bred, weaned, grown to finishing weight, and processed right here in Kentucky.

During the first phase of its growth, the company also commissioned a marketing study to find out what commercial customers want. The results were a bit surprising.
“They want quality first, service second, and price third,” Rogers said.

“We found out they would pay up to 20 percent more if they got those three attributes,” said Brian Newman, Green County Extension agent for agriculture and natural resources, who has worked long and hard to coordinate resources from the College of Ag for the company in areas such as feeding regulations, marketing, animal nutrition, and food science.

Green River Cattle is now marketing its premium beef to some restaurants in Louisville, to a grocery store chain in Central Kentucky, and through the farm supply business owned by the family of one of its members. The company is also buying cattle from other area producers—another boost to the local economy. It expects to show a profit in three to five years.

Bolstered by an additional $90,000 matching grant from the Kentucky Agricultural Development Board in September 2003, the company, in its intermediate phase, will hire marketing and production coordinators and continue to expand.
While this company’s model is not the only method beef cattle farmers can use to increase their profits, it does show how the state’s farmers, working cooperatively, are infusing Kentucky’s agriculture with creative, bold ideas.

Growing
a Crop of Pleasure

Kevan Evans, a Scott County farmer, is now planting fun along with his fruits and vegetables. He, like other farmers across the state, has decided that agritourism, or the industry of bringing tourists back to the rural life, offers the best new hope for the future.
“I weaned myself away from tobacco in 1998,” said Evans, who owns Evans Orchard and Cider Mill on Scott County’s southeastern edge. Evans has reshaped the farm that his family has owned since the 1940s into an agritourism destination. It benefits from the buzz of a county-wide tourism effort in the fall known as the Harvest Trail. But, much credit is due to the ingenuity of Evans and his daughter Jenny (who graduated in 1999 from the College of Agriculture with a degree in agricultural economics with an emphasis in food marketing).

The Evans family planted its first apple trees in the mid-90s and, year by year, added other fruits and vegetables, selling them at farmer’s markets and wholesale. They also had some strokes of genius that point up how essential good marketing is to successful agritourism:

First, they opened up the orchard to school tours, even tailoring the tours to the schools’ curriculum. The students, Evans said, “come back on the weekends with their parents and buy.”

Second, they applied for (and obtained) a $125,000 grant from the Kentucky Agricultural Development Board to purchase a cider mill, making them owners of one of two cider mills now operating in the state. The Evanses now buy apples from other orchard growers, turn them into cider, sell some of it back to the growers, and sell some of it themselves.

The Evanses matched the ag development grant with money of their own to convert their tobacco barn into a store. Now, on a good weekend, that store is full of tourists buying cider slushes, T-shirts, jams, fried apple pies, and fresh fruits and vegetables as well as cider that’s produced a stone’s throw from the cash register.

Scott County ag agent Mark Reese worked closely with Evans as he made the switch to agritourism. Extension specialist John Strang helped him choose apple varieties and plan the orchard layout. Reese and Strang are just two examples of how Extension is helping farmers and communities across the state find ways for tourists to experience the land.

Learning How Business
Works in America

Shane Lyle is a Lexington architect whose firm bills a half million dollars a year.
When Lyle was 16, he was among the 10 percent of his junior class at Allen County-Scottsville High School who took part in the American Private Enterprise System Program. Lyle got a crash course in business during those few days.

He toured factories and local businesses and learned about sole proprietorships, corporations, and liability.

Lyle went on to graduate from UK in 1983 with a degree in architecture. Now, his firm, Lyle Associates Architects, designs homes, fire stations, courthouses, city halls, and office buildings across the state.

He is only one of Kentucky's success stories with the American Private Enterprise System Program on his resume.

“Ours is a model program for how to reach youth,” said Lionel Williamson, Extension professor in agricultural economics, about the program, which is a joint effort between the UK College of Agriculture and the Kentucky Council of Cooperatives. Williamson has been state coordinator of the Kentucky program since 1985.
In the early 1950s, when the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives wanted to expand its program to youth, it looked to the Cooperative Extension Service in Kentucky to put together the pilot program.

Then and now, Extension agents help pull together an estimated 2,000 volunteers in 200 high schools to plan the program. Every year 1,500 to 1,800 kids across Kentucky take part. Between 125 and 150 of them, like Lyle, go on to the state program, and about 10 percent of that group goes to the national event, as he did.

“It's a fantastic program,” Williamson said. “It exposes young people to basic business and economic principles, it encourages them to learn more about how business and government in their communities operate, and it allows the local population to take ownership.”

Mrs. Antrobus Goes to Frankfort

Imogene Antrobus of Woodford County was in her mid-60s when she started her own business. Then she turned 70 and became a political activist. This is how it happened:
“Our tobacco had been cut so much that it was hard to make ends meet. I visited the farmer's market and I thought that would be some way I could make a little extra money and help with the bills,” she said.



Antrobus started selling her pickles, relishes, and salsa at the local farmer's market. For five years, she was able to bring home about $3,000 every year.
But in July of 2002, at the county’s Twilight Festival on the courthouse square, she was shut down. Unbeknownst to Antrobus, state law apparently didn't allow sale of home-processed products made outside a commercial kitchen.

“This little old mountain girl got stirred up,” said Antrobus, who was born in Powell County.

Interested legislators went to work to help her and other farm families. So did Extension. Patti Meads, Woodford County Extension agent for horticulture, researched how other states regulate home-processed products. Then, Antrobus, who had “never spoken anywhere but Homemakers and Sunday school,” went to Frankfort and testified before two legislative committees.

Last year, House Bill 391 became law. It allows farm families to sell their home-processed wares if they follow prescribed guidelines for food safety. Under the new law, the Cooperative Extension Service, in cooperation with the state Department of Public Health, is providing the training necessary for state certification of home-based canners to ensure food quality and safety. Antrobus has already taken the training.

Kentucky has a wide range of home-based businesses—flowers, foods, specialty meats, greenhouses, wood products, and more—that are adding substantially to the state's economy.

Extension professionals are a resource for many of those who own these businesses, offering advice on raising products, workshops on value-added products, and guidance on business development.

Just ask Imogene Antrobus, who this year will set up shop once again at the Woodford County Farmer's Market. “They have been my backbone,” she said.

Grants help Extension carry out its mission.

“We are becoming more entrepreneurial as we seek to be wise stewards of public funding. We are working to multiply those funds to provide broader support for a range of needs Kentuckians face.”

—Larry Turner
Associate Dean for Extension
and Associate Director, Cooperative Extension Service

We’re Expanding
Our Funding Sources

Roy Burris had been on the road that week, nowhere near his desk. But when he walked into his office at the Research and Education Center at Princeton late one afternoon, the application for the USDA grant was there waiting for him.

That grant was for integrated resource management (IRM) for beef producers in Kentucky and Tennessee. It was also five years of planning, months of writing, weeks of hope, and 65 pages long. Now, unexpectedly, the application had to be rewritten by 10 a.m. the next day.

“I rewrote it that night,” said Burris, Extension professor in animal sciences. The next morning, it had to be retyped. “By pleading with four secretaries, we split it up and actually got it done,” Burris said.

Then Burris got in a car and drove 200 miles to Lexington, got the necessary signatures on the application, and turned it in on time.

Researchers in the College are not strangers to such skin-of-our-teeth stories, since grants have been their bread and butter for years.

But more and more, the Cooperative Extension Service is expanding its capabilities by applying for and receiving grant funds to help accomplish its mission.
“Some of it,” Burris said, “is figuring out how to navigate the landscape.”

The Beef IRM grant, requested through USDA’s Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems (IFAFS) program, was approved for $750,000. The application was so solid, the proposal so good, that it became one of only 15 percent of grant applications funded in 2000.

The grant has already resulted, through May 2003, in beef producers in Kentucky and Tennessee recouping an additional $9.1 million due to grant-funded programs that were put in place.

Five-State Beef Initiative

Once beef cattle leave the farm, they can easily go into what Lee Meyer, Extension professor in agricultural economics, has called “never-never land”—the producer has no idea how the cattle compare to other cattle on the market and may be clueless about what changes, if made, would bring home more profit. A grant submitted in 2000 for what’s called the Five-State Beef Initiative was designed to change that.

Ten to 15 Extension professionals from Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan worked on the grant over two years, traveling to Indiana several times to sit around a table at Purdue and “put flesh on the ideas,” Meyer said. In the end, the grant was a 200-page document—about 50 pages of application and 150 pages of supporting data.

Government and the private sector also helped shape the grant, which was funded, also through IFAFS, for $2.5 million in 2000. It will run through 2004.

Gary Woodall, a beef producer in Logan County who raises seed stock for Kentucky and Tennessee cattle producers, is one of the farmers who has benefited from the Five-State Beef Initiative.

Before the initiative was in place, he said, “all you could do is talk to the customers you sold your bulls to. We felt like we needed information closer to the consumer. We never got any information back before on whether we met the market demands at the meat case.”

Now, he and others are receiving information on calf health and the quality of their meat, and they're using it to adapt their breeding and management practices so that more dollars return home.

Success in obtaining grant funds has generated more of those funds. Last fall, for example, the Kentucky Agricultural Development Board awarded $230,000 to Extension to promote the ideas of the five-state concept more deeply in Kentucky. This program began in the fall of 2003.

Nancy Cox, associate dean for research, called these two initiatives “tremendous application of new technologies in our home state as well as recognition of our excellence in the competitive federal arena.”

“This is truly the best of both worlds,” she said, “accomplished with the help of valued partners including the Kentucky Cattlemen’s Association, the Kentucky Beef Network, the Ag Development Board, the Farm Bureau, the stockyard industry, and others.”
Grants such as Beef IRM and the Five-State Beef Initiative have enabled Kentucky to leverage its own investment in College of Agriculture programs with federal dollars, Cox said.

Crossing Boundaries

In Extension, there are rarely clear boundaries between projects. Instead, collaboration is the model—professionals in several disciplines may be involved. For example, John Johns, Extension professor in beef nutrition and management, deserves much of the credit for the early emphasis on IRM in Kentucky and was also a leader in Kentucky's involvement in the Five-State Beef Initiative.

“It's not as usual for Extension to go after grants,” Burris said. But, as these initiatives show, it's much more usual than it used to be.

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