Convening for its seventh hearing at UMass Amherst, the “Special Commission on Agriculture in the 21st Century” met to review the state’s quote “technical assistance and education programs and to consider opportunities to adapt programs to meet the evolving needs of farms and farmers.”
Hampshire, Franklin and Worcester State Senator Jo Comerford co-chairs the commission.
“The main reason we've all gathered here together - to discuss education and technical assistance and agriculture,” Comerford said Friday. “The Commission statute requires us to review the UMass Extension Program, and other technical assistance and farmer education programs in Massachusetts.”
Speakers ranged from a representative of Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, to another from the Rutgers Cooperative Extension.
Before that though, the commission heard about the UMass Agricultural Extension Program – a program tasked with working across the state to spread knowledge and assist those who run some of the state’s 8,000 farms.
However, as director Clem Clay told the commission, doing so has become more and more difficult due to a number of challenges faced by UMass Extension.
“Funding and capacity is a major category of challenge,” Clay stated. “We, as I said, had flat or declining funding, depending on how you look at it. Lack of county funding, as I mentioned earlier, has been a real blow to our ability to be present in in across the state in the way that we used to be.”
Grants play a significant role in funding extension programs, but one example Clay gave was extension funding via the Smith-Lever Act – a law involving land-grant universities like UMass that foster programs that involve public outreach on developments on matters such as agriculture and government.
According to Clay, funding via Smith-Lever allocations has grown anemically since 2009, starting at $2.5 million and only climbing to around $2.9 million by fiscal year 2023 – completely outpaced by the rise of the consumer price index.
All the while, the demands for the extension program continue to grow.
“There's just, in general, an ever-expanding mandate for our work - climate change, urban agriculture, we're being drawn into so many new areas and trying to reach new audiences, and those are things we want to do and can do, but we need the capacity to do it," the director said.
Clay emphasized the program also lacks the same level of county funding extension programs in other states enjoy.
With the exception of Barnstable and Plymouth, most counties don’t directly fund the efforts, with funding primarily falling under the umbrella of the state itself as well as the UMass system.
Funding issues for extension programs resurfaced later in the meeting when a member of the Association of Northeast Extension Directors spoke.
Ali Mitchell, the group’s executive director, noted it’s not just UMass dealing with funding stagnation.
“-there's little indication that this is going to change,” Mitchell said. “For many LGU’s, especially those for which state match is limited to the required 1:1, this means that extension’s purchasing power, its core ability to do the work, has decreased while expectations placed on extension have increased.”
According to Clay’s presentation, there are extension facilities across the Commonwealth, from the Pioneer Valley to the North Shore to Cape Cod and the South Coast.
