Why I Trust University Extension - Ep. 312

[00:00:00] Every time I tell you to check your local Extension office or I link a fact sheet from a university in the show notes, I am placing a bet. I am betting that a piece of paper written by a horticulture specialist at a land-grant university sitting on a .edu website is worth more than the top result that you would get from typing your question into a search engine.

[00:00:22] I make that bet multiple times in almost every episode of this show, 311 times now if we're counting, and I've actually never stopped to explain why. So today we're going to talk about where the university extension came from, what the people who work there spend their time doing, and how the information gets checked before it ever reaches you.

[00:00:46] And I'm going to be honest with you about the places where that system falls short, because it does sometimes. And pretending otherwise isn't going to do any of us any favors. Welcome back to Just Grow Something, I'm Karin Velez, market farmer and horticulturist, and the person who has spent a lot of years learning the hard way so that you don't have to. Today's episode is a little bit different. We're not talking about pests or planting dates or soil tests or even mulch, if you can believe it.

[00:01:12] Just the story of an institution that most of you interact with every single week of the gardening season, whether you realize it or not. Let's dig in. So with this story, I want to take you back a little bit further, or maybe a lot further than you would probably guess. Before there was a university extension office in your county, before there was a master gardener program,

[00:01:40] There were farmers meeting in barns and church basements, just comparing notes. Agricultural clubs and societies started showing up after the American Revolution in the early 1800s, because farmers figured out pretty quickly that the fastest way to get better at growing something was to talk to somebody else who had already tried it. Now, in 1819, a farm journal called American Farmer started publishing readers' own accounts of what worked and what didn't.

[00:02:10] And that is the root of everything we are talking about today. Neighbors sharing results instead of everyone learning individually by trial and error. So the first real turning point came in 1862, in the middle of the Civil War. Congress passed what's called the Moral Act, and it did something the federal government had never done before.

[00:02:35] It gave states public land that they could sell to fund colleges. Not colleges for the wealthy few that could already afford a classical education. Colleges built specifically to teach agriculture and what they called the mechanic arts alongside the traditional coursework. Forty-eight colleges came out of that first act, and these became what we now call land-grant universities.

[00:03:04] And if you've ever wondered why so many big state schools have state in the name and a strong agriculture program, this is why. Now, a second Moral Act followed in 1890, and this one mattered just as much, if not more. It was aimed at the post-Civil War South, and it led directly to the creation of 17 historically black colleges and universities that also carry land-grant status today.

[00:03:33] So when we talk about land-grant institutions or land-grant universities, we're talking about more than one wave of schools, and there is more than one story to it. Well, having a college was one thing. Having research worth teaching was something entirely different. So in 1887, Congress passed the Hatch Act, naming it for a Missouri congressman. Thank you very much.

[00:04:00] The Hatch Act set aside federal funding specifically to establish agricultural experiment stations attached to each land-grant college. So this is the moment that research became a formal, funded part of the mission. Not just teaching what was already known, but paying scientists to go figure out what we didn't know.

[00:04:25] Penn State's experiment station, for example, started running side-by-side fertility test plots in the 1880s, comparing crop rotations and fertilizer combinations on the same ground year after year. Some of those plots are still running. That means there are fertility trials in this country that have been collecting data continuously for well over 100 years.

[00:04:52] So by the end of the 1880s, we had colleges teaching agriculture, and we had stations doing agricultural research. What we didn't have yet was a reliable way to get that research out of the university and into the hands of the person who was actually farming the ground.

[00:05:14] And that gap is where our third piece comes in, and it's the one that most people mean when they say extension service. And I think it's worth thinking about that gap for just a second before we move on, because it's the same gap that I think about every time I sit down to build one of these episodes, and why I'm constantly searching through different resources that apply to the questions that everyday people have in their backyard garden.

[00:05:43] A study can sit in a scientific journal for years without changing a single practice in the field simply because nobody translated it. Scientific journals and studies, or the studies they contain, are not super easy to read or decipher as a layman. There are terms in there that most people just don't have in their everyday vocabulary.

[00:06:14] Extension exists because land-grant universities figured out really early on that publishing research wasn't the same thing as delivering it. You can have the best data in the world sitting in a file cabinet somewhere, and it does the farmer exactly no good until somebody walks it out to the farm and explains it in plain English.

[00:06:37] So a lot of credit for closing that gap goes to a man named Seaman Knapp, who worked for the USDA in the early 1900s. Knapp had an idea that kind of seems obvious now, but it really wasn't standard practice then. Instead of just publishing a bulletin and hoping that farmers read it, how about we put the new methods on an actual working farm right in the community and then let the farmers watch the results with their own eyes?

[00:07:05] She ran a demonstration farm in Texas that proved a changed approach to cotton varieties and field management could hold up against the bold weevil, which was devastating cotton farms across the South at the time. Farmers believed what they could see happening, two fields over, a lot faster than they believed a pamphlet. Now, Knapp passed away in 1911.

[00:07:31] Three years later, in 1914, Senator Hoke Smith of Georgia and Representative Asbury Lever of South Carolina got a bill through Congress that turned Knapp's demonstration model into a permanent national system. And that's the Smith-Lever Act, and it's the piece of legislation that created what we call the Cooperative Extension Service.

[00:07:51] President Wilson signed it on May 8, 1914, and called it one of the most significant measures for adult education the government had ever passed. And I don't really think he was exaggerating. At the time, more than half the country lived in rural areas, and something like 30% of the entire workforce farmed for a living. So this was built to reach a huge share of the population in the place where they lived and worked.

[00:08:21] Think about what that meant on the ground. A county agent in 1915 wasn't just emailing a fact sheet, okay? They were riding out to a farm, walking the fields with the farmer, and showing them a technique in person. That is an enormous commitment of federal, state, and county resources aimed at one goal, closing the distance between a research station and a working farm.

[00:08:49] The fact that the same basic model is still standing more than 100 years later tells you something about how well it was built. We have had Extension agents come out to this farm to demonstrate a technique the exact same way that they were doing back in the early 1900s.

[00:09:09] And what's even better is that the Smith-Lever Act set up a shared partnership between federal, state, and county government. Goodness knows that would never happen these days. Nobody fully owns the Extension. The federal government puts money in. The state land-grant university puts money and expertise in. And the county puts money in, too, which is why your local Extension office answers to your university

[00:09:39] and has real ties to your own county government at the same time. That's also why funding and staffing can look vastly different from one county to the next, even within the same state. You're looking at a three-way partnership instead of, like, a single top-down agency that manages everything. Oh, and the word extension was actually purposeful.

[00:10:06] The whole point was to extend the university out past its own walls, out to the people who would never set foot on a campus. Taking the university to the people is often how it's described. And helping people help themselves was really the guiding idea from day one. So that's where university extension came from.

[00:10:31] But let's talk about what it looks like now, because it's grown into something bigger than I think most people realize. Okay, I've got a confession. I am on my fourth cup of coffee today, and I'm not even a little bit sorry about it. 20 years of farming will do that to you. But it's also made me picky about where my food and drink actually come from, because I know exactly how much sweat goes into growing something, and I know what it feels like to want to be paid fairly for that work.

[00:11:00] So when it comes to my coffee, I hold it to the same standard I hold my own tomatoes to. How was this grown, and who got paid for growing it? That's why I said yes when Larry's Coffee reached out. Every one of their coffees is certified organic and shade-grown, so it checks my sustainability box. But they're also Fairtrade certified, meaning the farmers behind every bag get paid fairly, no matter where in the world they're growing. None of that matters, though, if the coffee's no good.

[00:11:27] And I drink mine black, so there's nowhere for a mediocre cup to hide. I'm partway through my third variety of Larry's right now. I'm really enjoying the cowboy blend. And I've already ordered two more, so that should tell you something. Go to LarrysCoffee.com slash JustGrow right now, and you will get a free pair of handmade grass coasters from their fair trade artisan partners in Guatemala with your first order. Automatically added to your cart, no code needed.

[00:11:54] Support the farmers, support your coffee habit, and mine. LarrysCoffee.com slash JustGrow. It's in the show notes, but don't wait for that. Go now and use that URL to support the show, plus get your free gift. LarrysCoffee.com slash JustGrow.

[00:12:18] There are more than 100 land-grant colleges and universities in this system today, in all 50 states and the U.S. territories. And every single one of them operates on what is called a three-part mission. Teaching, research, and extension. Teaching is what you would expect. Degree programs on campus or now online. Research happens at the agricultural experiment stations that we talked about,

[00:12:46] the direct descendants from that 1887 Hatch Act funding. And extension is the piece that takes what the research finds and gets it out to the public for free without a degree requirement or a tuition bill attached. Nationally, that system runs through close to 3,000 county or regional offices. There's an extension presence in or near almost every county in the U.S.

[00:13:13] Over 600,000 volunteers support the programming nationwide, and extensions for H youth programs alone reach around 6.5 million young people. This is one of the largest public education infrastructures in the country, and most of us only ever interact with just the tiny slice of it that deals with tomatoes and squash bugs.

[00:13:38] Now, the funding piece explains a lot about how extension behaves. Smith-Lever money comes from Congress, but it comes with a matching requirement. The state and often the county have to put up funding too. That means your local extension office isn't purely a federal outpost. It's accountable to your state university and a lot of places to your county commission,

[00:14:04] which is part of why extension agents tend to be just so tuned in to what's happening in their specific region instead of speaking in generalities, which is actually fantastic. That funding structure also explains why services can look so different depending on where you live. A well-funded county with a strong horticulture budget might have a full-time horticulture agent all to themselves

[00:14:33] and a demonstration garden and a staffed plant clinic. A smaller or more rural county might share one agent across several counties, which is very common here in Missouri. We have some agents covering up to 11 counties on their own on everything from row crops to 4-H to home gardening questions. That's just a reflection of the system, right? Extension was built to be locally responsive

[00:14:59] and local funding is part of what makes that responsiveness possible. If your county's extension presence feels thin, then I think it's worth knowing that it's often due to budget. And sometimes pressure from the public can actually change that. This is also the piece that explains why I trust a fact sheet from a university more than I trust a blog post or a video from someone with a large following

[00:15:29] and no institutional accountability behind them. When a land-grant university publishes something under its extension name, there is a research infrastructure behind it. An experiment station, in most cases, that generated the underlying data. And there's a state and federal funding relationship that comes with expectations about accuracy. A creator on social media, well, answers to an algorithm

[00:15:57] and an audience that rewards engagement, right? A blogger needs you to stay on the page long enough to serve you some ads so he or she can make money. I don't mean to say that either of those individuals is intentionally feeding us misinformation, but they don't have anybody to answer to. An extension specialist answers to a state legislature, a university, and a body of peer-reviewed science. Those are very different sets of incentives,

[00:16:27] and they tend to produce two very different sets of content. But none of this means that extension agents are infallible, of course, and we're going to get into the limits of that system here in a few minutes. But understanding the structure tells you why this information tends to hold up. It's not just one person's opinion published on the internet. It's the output of an institution that's been refining this exact process for well over 100 years.

[00:16:55] I also want to touch on how extension specialists themselves are trained. Most extension specialists hold advanced degrees in their subject area, whether that's plant pathology, entomology, soil science, horticulture, whatever. And a lot of them split their time between running original research at the experiment station and translating research,

[00:17:22] both their own and other scientists, into practical guidance for the public. That dual role is part of what makes a good extension specialist different from just a general science communicator. They're not just reading studies and summarizing them secondhand, kind of like what I do, right? In a lot of cases, they ran the trial themselves in soil that's not very far from you, more than likely,

[00:17:49] dealing with the same regional pests and weather that you deal with. When a Missouri extension entomologist tells me when squash vine borer adults typically emerge in our state, that's often based on trapping data collected in Missouri fields. It's not a national average that's pulled from a database. Someone asked me recently if I would ever become or consider becoming an extension agent.

[00:18:15] And as much knowledge and experience and education as I have, I would not likely be able to fill a role as an extension agent in most areas of this country without going back to get my master's in horticulture or some other related field and doing the research that goes along with it. And homie ain't about that life no more. So the big fat answer there is, um, no. Now let's get to the part of extension

[00:18:43] that a lot of home gardeners already have some contact with, even if they've never thought about where it came from. And that is the Master Gardener Program. This one is actually newer than the rest of the story. It didn't start until 1972. A Washington State University extension agent named David Gibby was drowning in phone calls from home gardeners asking about plant problems. He and a fellow agent, Bill Shearer, were just completely overwhelmed.

[00:19:11] So their idea was simple. Train volunteers in real horticultural science in exchange for a commitment of hours spent answering the public's gardening questions. So they tested this with a public clinic at the Tacoma Mall in the fall of 1972. And they really did just expect a modest turnout. They got hundreds of applicants. So out of that pool,

[00:19:38] 150 people went through the very first Master Gardener training class in the spring of 1973. And every one of them had to pass a state pesticide exam to be certified. So the name itself, Master Gardener, actually was kind of borrowed from the German word Gartenmeister, someone who has reached the top proficiency level in horticulture, which I think is kind of cool. The model worked so well

[00:20:06] that it spread to nearly every state and into several Canadian provinces. The thing that people usually don't realize, and I talked with Gardener Scott from YouTube about this in his interview episode, I'll leave a link to that in the show notes, is that the Master Gardener volunteer isn't just like a random gardening enthusiast who decided that they want to volunteer and help out and answer questions.

[00:20:34] In every state and every university has their own requirements, but to earn the title in Missouri, someone has to complete a 30-hour core training course covering soils, plant nutrition, vegetables, fruit, woody and herbaceous ornamentals, propagation, disease and insect management, lawn care, and safe pesticide use. Then, they have to commit to 30 hours of volunteer service back to their community,

[00:21:03] answering exactly the kind of questions that Gardener's ask all the time. That training comes from university specialists drawing on the Extension's research base. And it's not a one-and-done credential. Most state programs require ongoing volunteer hours and continuing education to stay active, which means an experienced Master Gardener has likely put in years of accumulated hours

[00:21:30] fielding real questions from real gardeners in your climate. That's someone that's worth trusting when you're standing in your garden trying to figure out why something's going wrong. I have given presentations to Master Gardener groups and had them come do tours of the farm as part of their continuing education program here locally. So, the next time you call a county Extension hotline or you find a Master Gardener booth at your local garden show

[00:21:59] or even at your farmer's market, understand what's standing behind that volunteer. This is 50 years of a program built specifically to close the gap between university research and your actual backyard. It's kind of the next step of Extension. Extension reached the commercial growers, Master Gardener's reach, the home growers.

[00:22:28] Now, I don't want you walking away thinking that every single thing published under an Extension logo carries the same weight because it doesn't. And I don't want to pretend otherwise because y'all know I don't like misinformation. It drives me nuts. So, here's how the checking process is supposed to work. A lot of Extension content, especially anything meant for statewide or very broad distribution, so like fact sheets and bulletins and formal publications, the types of things that I normally link to in the show notes,

[00:22:57] goes through peer review before it's published. So, that means qualified, independent, subject matter experts read the material and evaluate it for accuracy before it ever reaches us, okay? Oregon State's Extension Service, for example, runs either a double-blind or a non-blind peer review process depending on the content. And then once a piece passes, it gets marked with a specific insignia showing it's been reviewed. And as you know,

[00:23:27] Oregon State is my alma mater and that is where I learned the peer review process. Illinois Extension runs something similar. Clemson has taken this even further with something called Land Grant Press. It's a peer-reviewed publishing platform specifically for Extension content. That's the strong end of the system. The caveat is that not everything an Extension Office publishes goes through

[00:23:55] the same level of scrutiny. So, time-sensitive material, things like newsletter issues, webinar recordings, even podcast episodes, something like this, typically isn't peer-reviewed in the formal sense because the review cycle takes time and that content is meant to be current, not permanent. And peer review also isn't universal across every university. Some land-grant institutions have a rigorous,

[00:24:25] well-documented process. Others are less consistent about it. And there is a well-known horticulture blog written by different university faculty called Garden Professors. And they have pointed out directly that not all Extension publications are created equal and that inconsistent standards can put good Extension educators in the very uncomfortable position of defending work that never went through a real review to begin with. And I have taken issue

[00:24:55] at times with things that the Garden Professors blog has published. So, turnabout is fair play, I guess. So, what does that mean practically when you're the one reading a fact sheet at 10 o'clock at night trying to figure out why your tomatoes have blossomed rot? A few things that I would encourage you to check. Look at whether the publication states its review status outright. A lot of them will tell you directly if they've been peer-reviewed. That's a good sign. Also, look at the date.

[00:25:25] Horticultural recommendations change as research advances, especially anything involving pest management or new cultivars. And a publication that's more than about 10 years old may not really reflect the newest information. Look for citations or a reference list, right? A page that points you to the underlying research is a page that's willing to show its work, just like the references that I list

[00:25:54] at the end of every one of these episodes. And think about whether the content matches your specific situation. A publication that is written for large-scale commercial vegetable production doesn't always translate cleanly to a backyard raised bed, even when it comes from a great university. I would also look at the domain and the author. A .edu address

[00:26:23] tied to a named extension specialist or agent is a very different source than a gardening blog that happens to quote a university study somewhere in the middle of the article. It is incredibly common for commercial gardening sites to cite a real piece of extension research, but then build a bunch of unsupported claims around that one citation to make the whole article

[00:26:53] look credible. The citation is real. The surrounding content isn't necessarily anything the university stands behind. And I'm telling you this from reading blog posts from very well-known sources like commercial seed suppliers. So, when you see the studies show, and I'm using Airbnb's here, on a site that itself isn't a research institution,

[00:27:23] including mine by the way, it is worth clicking through and checking what the actual study said rather than trusting the summary that someone else built on top of it. Especially if you're not super familiar with the source or it's not something that you read all the time. And, if you're ever genuinely unsure whether something is solid, most states run a free service usually called Ask Extension or something similar

[00:27:51] where you can submit your specific question, often with a photo, directly to a horticulture specialist or a trained master gardener. That's a real person backed by that research infrastructure that we've spent this whole episode talking about looking at your actual problem instead of a generic version of it. I use that kind of resource myself when I run into something outside my own experience and I would encourage you to use it too instead of guessing

[00:28:20] from a forum thread or using a picture identification app. The number of times those things have been wrong here recently in groups where I have seen people post those results is astounding. Now we also need to remember though that universities are regional by design. A fact sheet from University of Florida about fire ant management is written for Florida's climate and Florida's

[00:28:49] pest pressure. It's excellent information for Florida. That's why when I build an episode for you I'm not just grabbing whatever comes up first in a search. I'm looking for university sources whose climate and growing conditions are wide reaching and don't just resemble ours here in the Midwest because oftentimes the underlying science is universal like plant physiology or an insect's life cycle but sometimes

[00:29:19] it is very region specific and I don't want to steer you the wrong way just by grabbing the first resource that I find. That cross checking by the way is a big part of what makes this show take as long as it does to put together and it's a step that a lot of quick internet answers skip entirely especially if the answer you're getting back is generated by AI without a lot of specifics in the question. So I will give you a concrete example

[00:29:49] of how that plays out. When I researched our Blossom and Rot episode several state extension sources agreed on the underlying calcium and water uptake mechanism but they didn't all agree on how much to emphasize soil calcium versus watering consistency as the fix and that difference tracked pretty closely with how much rainfall variability each state typically deals with. So that's

[00:30:19] the kind of regional I don't know fingerprint print that you only catch by reading more than one source and it's exactly why I don't stop at the first university publication that answers a question and why when you look something up you should always take your region and your climate into consideration. None of this is a reason to distrust extension. If anything I think it's a reason to trust it more because the system is very honest about its own limits. So I want to close out this

[00:30:49] episode with why I think this conversation matters more right now than it would have like 10 or 15 years ago. Most of us don't get our gardening advice from a library book or a single trusted neighbor anymore. We get it from social media, from an endless scroll of short videos and that environment rewards whatever gets the most engagement. Not necessarily whatever is most accurate.

[00:31:18] As a matter of fact you often see the stuff that is the least accurate pushed the most because people are calling it out right? But not everybody goes into the comments and realizes oh wait that is bad information that's why it's popping up in my feed. Researchers who study how gardening advice spreads online have described a fairly predictable pattern. A real scientific finding, tested and reviewed, gets picked up by a blog or a video, it gets

[00:31:47] simplified along the way, it gets re-shared, and by the third or fourth hop away from the original research the nuance is completely gone and what's left is a very confident claim that may not actually hold up. It's like the science version of that old telephone game. Oregon State University's extension office ran a public myth-busting piece not that long ago correcting things like the idea that

[00:32:16] lime removes moss from your lawn. It doesn't, by the way. Moss grows because of shade and wet infertile soil and the real fix is improving the light and the soil fertility, not dumping lime on the problem. Small correction, but it is a myth that has been repeated so many times it feels true and that's exactly the mechanism that we're talking about. A claim doesn't need to be accurate to spread. It just needs to be easily repeatable

[00:32:46] and to sound plausible enough that nobody stops to check it. So multiply that lawn moss example by every gardening topic that gets discussed online and you can see the scale of what we're up against. This is part of why I have eventually built this whole show the way that I have. When you hear me reference a university publication in an episode, I want you to know that there is a reason that I went looking for that

[00:33:16] specific source instead of just telling you what I've heard repeated a hundred times in gardening groups or what I have done myself. It's not because I think that my own farming and personal gardening experience doesn't count. 19 seasons of farming and multiple years of gardening before that has taught me plenty that no fact sheet ever will. And it's not because I have a degree in horticulture like we talked about last week. The science is always changing.

[00:33:46] It's because pairing what I've lived through and my own education with research that's been checked by someone other than me is how that you get advice that's genuinely trustworthy instead of just confident and potentially wrong. Unlike the umpteen posts that I saw last week in three different online gardening groups where someone asked about Blossom Enrod and someone else recommended Epsom salts.

[00:34:15] I can't help everybody. So that's the story. From farmers comparing notes in the early 1800s to a civil era land grant to a research mandate in 1887, a nationwide teaching system built in 1914 all the way to the master gardener volunteer answering your call at the county office today. That is the

[00:34:45] chain of custody behind pretty much every fact I hand you on this show. The other part of my research for these episodes is the papers published in the peer-reviewed science journals but that's a completely different animal and one the extension service was actually designed to save you from. In the show notes I am linking the sources behind everything I covered today because of course I am the history, the current structure, the origin of the Master Gardener

[00:35:15] program, and a piece on evaluating extension publications that I think every serious gardener should probably read at least once. Have fun with that. Until next time my gardening friends keep on cultivating that dream garden and we'll talk again soon.