Trends and Issues in Extension

Thomas Rowley over at Rural Policy Research Institute (RPRI) provides an editorial on the impact of federal budget changes on rural America. Thomas sees mostly bad news, but finds some good nuggets in the details.

Extension Daily has a post on Senate’s Deficit Reduction Legislation. No discussions of the effects on Cooperative Extension, but and interesting discussion ag related impacts. Good links in the article.

CSREES has release their bi-weekly national update. Information on fuding, etc. Of particiular interest should be the link to the National Research Initiatives.

Don Iannone has post with some scenarios from Global Insight that summarizes some possible outcomes for the economy after Hurricane Katrina. Best case: $3.00 gas for a few months, then down to $2.50 with a drag on the economy. There are still unknowns in the damage done to the oil industry infrastructure in the Gulf, so the scenarios could be worse. It is very likely that the damage estimates (and related costs) will only increase as more information comes out.

Today’s NY Times as an article (free registration required) about how some consumers are still dragging their feet about banking online. What really interests me is not that people are not banking online, but that they are purchasing other items online. Here are some implications for Extension:

• We need to move aggressively to develop 24/7 online systems and expand our abilities to accept payments electronically.
• Local governments and states  that rely on sales tax from stores in their geographic boundaries could lose sales tax revenues. Many of these governments also fund Exension. This was a topic of conversation introduced by county commissioners at this week’s County Commissioner Days in Ohio. A public policy issue to discuss and work on.

The Appalachian Regional Commission has several online resources, including this post on proposal writing tips. As Extension Professionals move more towards cost-recovery and social entrepreneurship the ability to secure external funding will be critical.

Prometheus has this post with a link to a current outlook report on federal spending for research. The outlook: better than a month ago, but still somewhat flat outside of NASA. USDA seems to be heading in the wrong direction.

Extension implications: a strong probability of continued flat federal funding for formula budgets with continued pressures to move the formula budgets to competitive funding.

Two grant workshops are being offered to help those interested in pursing USDA-CSREES funding.

The first is sponsored by the Southern Association of Agricultural Experiment Station Directors

(SAAESD),Northeastern Regional Association of State Agricultural

Experiment Station Directors (NERA) and Cooperative State Research,

Education, and Extension Service (CSREES) and will take place in Washington, DC on September 7-8 2005.

The second is sponsored by the Western Association of Agricultural Experiment Station Directors, Washington State Universtiy, and the University of Idaho and takes place in Moscow, Idaho on September 28-29. See the links for more details.

Slow economic growth has hurt county, state and federal tax rolls and in turn Extension funding. Ohio tax rolls have been stronger than expected.

Here is a posting from Econobrowser that discusses the Recession Probability Index. It indicates that we have only a 5% probability to be in a recession. Hopefully things keep looking up.