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By WENDY STIVER
MILL HALL – Most of us have heard of 4-H. It calls to mind images of horses, cows, pigs, goats and lots and lots of happy kids at the Clinton County Fair.
Most of us know, if we have a bug, flower or tomato question, we can call the Master Gardener Hotline.
These two popular programs are provided by Penn State Cooperative Extension – along with information on strength training, natural gas and many more topics we don’t immediately associate with the Extension.
Cooperative Extension in the United States will celebrate its centennial on Wednesday.
The milestone will be observed in Clinton County later this year.
In Lycoming County, everyone is invited to an open house Wednesday at the Lysock View Complex in Montoursville, at 542 County Farm Road, Suite 206, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. (For information, call 570-433-3040.)
May 8 is the 100-year milestone of making rural life better through education.
Knowledge is power, and once you get an Extension staff member talking about his favorite subject, you will undoubtedly learn something new. Even if you catch him in the grocery store, he will stop and talk about how to keep bees successfully, how to fight diabetes by eating well, how to calculate potential Marcellus Shale gas royalties.
Extension staffers are excited about what they do because it’s what they love.
THE NUMBERS
Last year, Clinton County taxpayers provided $150,000 (not including facilities) for Cooperative Extension here. In return, Extension provided us with $852,000 worth of services. District Director Craig Altemose suggests this number is actually closer to $1 million in educational programs alone.
Lycoming County provided $200,000 and Extension provided $1 million worth of services, including more than $400,000 worth of volunteer time.
Centre County provided $295,000, and the estimated return on that investment was more than $1,850,000 in educational programming and services, including $950,000 in 4-H and Master Gardener volunteer time.
These dollar figures don’t include in-kind services from partner industries and agencies that Extension leveraged for the counties.
PROGRAMS
Statewide programs provided in Clinton County focus on 4-H and youth, field and forage crops, natural resources including forestry, family consumer science, horticulture, dairy and livestock.
They include training for childcare professionals, Dining with Diabetes, Strong Women/Growing Stronger, the Master Gardener Program, and the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program that targets needy families.
Extension also is heavily involved in the effort to control flies on Amish farms in Sugar Valley.
In addition, the Marcellus Shale Center for Outreach and Research – at Penn State and the Pennsylvania College of Technology – provides a good deal of useful information, some of which is on the Extension website at: extension.psu.edu.
THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE
The Clinton County Cooperative Extension Board of Directors is made up of volunteers, including city residents who have never been in 4-H or successfully kept a house plant alive for longer than a week.
The board should accurately reflect the population of the county, so there is a place at the decision-making table for all kinds of people who care about Extension and education.
There is a board vacancy right now, and everyone interested is encouraged to give the local office a call at 570-726-0022 or stop in at 47 Cooperation Lane, just off Nittany Valley Drive (Route 64) between Mill Hall and Lamar.
Altemose attends the board meetings and gives advice as the paid director of District 7 which includes Clinton, Centre, Lycoming and Clearfield counties. (Pennsylvania has 19 district directors and two county directors – for Allegheny and Philadelphia counties.)
Dennis Calvin is the overall director of Penn State Extension with Bill Kleiner as associate director. Above them in the hierarchy is Barbara Christ, interim dean of the College of Agriculture at Penn State.
FAMILIAR FACES
Paid staff provide the educational programming. Some of them cover many counties.
Sometimes Extension educators from different districts come here to share their knowledge, Altemose said, as with the fly problem in Sugar Valley last year when Extension formed a “SWAT Team” of experts to deal with it.
Most of the names and faces of Clinton County’s staff members are familiar ones. They are Express columnists who write about gardening, horses, 4-H, insects, healthy eating and exercise – the things that make up the highs, and occasional lows, of daily living in our region.
Laurie Weinreb Welch is back. She covers a number of counties and has picked up Clinton again. A nutrition and family living expert, she is well known through her service on boards and committees as well as working with partner agencies.
The biggest and brightest gem in her crown of service is the Clinton County Community Dental Clinic. She obtained grants and expended a considerable amount of blood, sweat and tears to establish it. The dental clinic provides services for less fortunate families. It has paid employees but also relies on area dentists who are willing to accept reimbursements from medical programs for low-income residents. Without the clinic, many of its clients would not be able to afford dental care.
Tom Butzler writes his newspaper column and the blog “Gardening in the Keystone State” and also does TV and radio call-in shows for WPSU on horticulture topics.
He has played a big part in “Beekeeping 101,” an online Extension course that is proving very popular.
His projects include sweet corn monitoring in Rote for the corn earworm and European corn borer; the Pesticide Applicator Short Course that prepares professionals to take the exam to be certified; the annual Vegetable Conference at the Sugar Valley Rural Charter School; Green Industry winter update meetings; and the annual Pest Walk in Loganton that helps growers maintain their Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture pesticide license.
Also working in horticulture is Quentin Stocum, a volunteer, who coordinates the Master Gardener Program in Clinton County. The 14 active Master Gardeners here man the hotline, set up information booths, and take care of Extension’s demonstration gardens on Cooperation Lane in Mill Hall. One of them, Tina Clinefelter, also writes columns for The Express.
Stocum, by the way, was the first to report the lily leaf beetle in Pennsylvania, a pest discovery that was made in 2013.
Kirsten Dubbs is the 4-H and community development educator on staff. Working with her is Livestock Coordinator Wayne Bechdel, a volunteer. (The program also relied on Helene McKernan in the past, but she is spending more time on horse-related research now).
In Clinton County last year, the 4-H program had 183 youth, ages 5 to 19, enrolled including 111 teens. A total of 51 screened, trained 4-H volunteers led 12 clubs. Volunteers gave an estimated 240 hours of service per volunteer – worth a total of 12,240 hours and a dollar value of $269,280 – to the program.
Other local Extension staff members include Lori Masser, the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program educator; office manager Ann Brunner; and administrative/program assistant Laura Sproat.
Dave Jackson of Centre County provides forestry education.
Jim Ladlee, Tom Murphy and Carol Loveland of Lycoming County provide Marcellus Shale education.
Surprisingly, there is no agriculture educator in District 7. The district director said he is focused on getting one, but for now, agriculture services must come from outside the region.
FARM ISSUES
As district director, Altemose is primarily an administrator, but he has a background in agriculture specializing in agronomy.
He remembers when he received the first email from a county commissioner about the fly problem in Sugar Valley. It was on a Saturday and he was in Vermont, he said, but he got the ball rolling that day. He and Butzler sat down the following Monday to tackle the problem in earnest. Eventually eight Extension staff members joined the “SWAT Team.”
Other partners in the effort have included the Conservation District, the state Department of Agriculture, the Amish bishops and the entire local community, all of them concerned about getting flies on chicken farms under control.
The lesser house fly seemed to run rampant in Sugar Valley last summer. This fly can reproduce in any organic matter in wet conditions – wet leaves, for instance, can be a breeding ground, according to Altemose. It takes only 10 days for a flush of flies to reproduce, making things unpleasant for Valley residents.
Extension has offered seminars on Best Management Practices for manure to address the problem, and while there is no magic bullet, the fly should be less annoying this year.
Reaching a solution – and maintaining it – is really about community development, Altemose said. This community has come together to learn about the problem and take steps toward solving it.
“You are never going to have a situation on a farm where the flies all go away,” he said. “The question is can you manage the population on the farm so it’s not a noticeable issue in the community?
“The community knows how important agriculture is to Sugar Valley and to Clinton County and surrounding counties,” he said. “Farmers know how important it is to be members of the community… They monitor their fly populations and if they see a slight increase, there’s going to be a phone call.
“Greg Martin (of Lancaster County Extension) will come out and work with them and the county representatives from the chicken processing company. The company works with the farmers. It wants to control the flies because the quality of the product is worse when there is a major fly problem,” he added.
Altemose has received the Distinguished Service Award for Pennsylvania and was recognized at the National Association of County Agriculture Agents in 2010 for his work with soybeans.
Soybeans, or edamame (pronounced edimommy) are the basis for many recipes, and the pods can be eaten by themselves as a snack.
Most of the product comes from China, Altemose said. He worked with other universities to find American varieties that would match the popular Asian ones. The research found that Moon Cake grows well here. It’s “sweet and tasty,” the district director said, and can be eaten blanched in the pod or shelled.
He did a great deal of research on the topic at Rock Springs Agronomy Farm, then gave a presentation at the Pennsylvania Agronomic Education Society conference on the potential value of it for the local farmer. The idea is to get U.S. varieties into the marketplace and create a future for local farmers, he explained.
T.A. Seeds in Jersey Shore got interested in it shortly thereafter, he said. After working with four varieties, the local company is now concentrating on Moon Cake. Since it has agreements with the originators of the seeds, it should become a major supplier.
Anyone driving by T.A. Seeds at the right time of year will see the soybeans from the road, since Moon Cake grows taller than other soybeans, Altemose said. It keeps growing and continues to flower and put on pods while other varieties will stop growing when they flower and just concentrate on the pods, he explained.
Altemose, now a national presenter on the subject, wants to see local seminars given this summer.
A HUNDRED YEARS AGO
The centennial celebration focuses on the Smith-Lever Act which was signed by Congress on May 8, 1914 and founded the nationwide Cooperative Extension System.
Pennsylvania’s interest in extension work in agriculture dates much farther back, to 1785 when the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture was formed.
Pennsylvania was one of the first states to formalize its farmers’ institutes, in 1876, and to unite its teaching with the School of Agriculture, in 1882.
And Penn State was the very first in the country to offer correspondence course work in agriculture and home economics, in 1892. In addition, staff participated in state-sponsored Farmer’s Institutes across Pennsylvania.
The Penn State Board of Trustees then established the Agricultural Extension Service in 1907. Alva Agee was the first director.
Before county offices were set up, Extension provided “Agricultural Trains” taking Penn State professors throughout the Commonwealth to conduct classes in the coaches and on station platforms. Trains also brought farmers to the Penn State campus.
The first county office was established in Bedford in 1908.
The first recorded youth program was a corn club in Mercer County in 1913.
In 1915, USDA started publishing bulletins addressing home and family living which grew into the home economics Extension bulletin.
Rural community development started with a pilot program in Fayette County in 1956. Now community development is integrated into Extension programs statewide.
The Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program, geared to low-income families, started in Pennsylvania in 1969.
In the early days, when a group of citizens wanted help from a county Extension agent, they had to provide travel expenses, an office and secretarial assistance. Penn State, as Pennsylvania’s land grant university that received federal Extension funding, would help them form a County Farm Bureau to provide this support. The bureaus eventually became the County Extension Associations. Funds were raised from membership dues, local businesses and other sources until 1913 when the Pennsylvania Legislature authorized the counties to provide tax dollars for county Extension.
Penn State Cooperative Extension, like so many other institutions, recently down-sized through retirements, lay-offs and reducing administration.
But it continues to provide services and is looking to the future as it builds a new and even more user-friendly website.
To find out more about Cooperative Extension, visit extension.psu.edu.