Educating with Extension Newsletters

Each month, the Extension Service publishes a newsletter about its exciting programs and events both past and upcoming. See what we are doing and how you can become involved. 

For our cover article for the March newsletter, Exploring our Roots: A Brief(er) History of Extension, we took excerpts from an article originally written by Bob Kellam, and later reduced as a blog for the Master Gardener Program by Karen Jeannette, titled Exploring our Roots: A Brief History of Extension. The newsletter also includes updates on many Extension events going on this month!

"It wasn’t so long ago that about half the U.S. population lived on farms. Now only about 2% of us do, and only 17% live in what are called “rural areas”. In the latter part of the 19th century, agriculture in America is an unproductive system, built on tradition, superstition, and backbreaking toil. Families spend as much as 40% of their income on food, and the disparity between the quality of life on the farm and life in the city is getting larger, with a considerable proportion of the former suffering from poverty and illiteracy. Most farmers are suspicious of the new techniques being developed by the fledgling USDA, referring to them as “book farming.” As a result, productivity is down, soils are being depleted in as few as 5 years, and food prices are going up..."

And because the week of February 25th through March 3rd is National Invasive Species Awareness Week, our Environmental Horticulture Agent, Michelle Leonard-Mularz, wrote a blog post, Invasive Species Invade Paradise. Be sure to check it out, here: http://blogs.ifas.ufl.edu/monroeco/2019/02/26/invasive-species-invade-paradise/

To read the article, and find events and programs of the Extension Service, check out the March 2019 Newsletter!