Dust on my Pants

Over the past year, I've been trying to spend less time staring at small screens and more time reading books. I've also tried to support a small, independent bookstore we discovered when our oldest daughter, Lara, started school at Montana State University way back in 2016 - the Country Bookshelf is definitely one of my favorite bookstores! In February, I ordered Montana: High Wide and Handsome by Joseph Kinsey Howard - a history of Montana originally published in the 1940s. The last third of the book discusses the fallacy of thinking the Mountain West could be homesteaded in the same manner as the Midwest, and the sod-busting and blowing dust that inevitably followed. What I didn't expect when I ordered the book was a detailed discussion of the role that cooperative extension ("county agents" in the book) played in helping Montanans recover from those Dust Bowl years. As a county-based extension researcher/educator myself, I was intrigued by this history - and by how similar my role is a century later. 

In some ways, I think, farmers and ranchers on the Northern Plains in the 1920s and 1930s must have faced a similar sense of uncertainty to that experienced by farmers and ranchers today. Economics, technological advances, and government policies had driven the expansion of a new kind farming in the decade preceding the economic and ecological collapse of the 1920s. And the climate was no longer a dependable ally. Dry, windy years blew the topsoil away - topsoil that would have been covered by prairie a generation earlier. I see similarities in the conversion of rangeland to more intensive agriculture here in California. And now, it seems, we can’t depend on the climate - we are experiencing the driest 2-year period in California in more than a generation. Just four years ago, we had the wettest year on record in my part of the Sierra foothills. “Average” weather has always meant that half the years were wetter and half were drier; the extremes on either side of “average” seem to be more severe today than they were a generation ago. And the extremes make it increasingly difficult to farm or ranch.

For many, I think, the challenge of coping with a changing climate seems too huge to comprehend, and so we look to huge solutions; solutions that someone else will devise and implement. After all, what can we do as individuals to turn back or reverse the global scale impacts of climate change? Like a Montana wheat farmer watching his topsoil blow into the next county (or the next state), what can an individual do to halt the impacts of climate change?

Howard writes of the planning and local, on-the-ground management changes that had to occur to make Montana farms and ranches both viable and sustainable - and to stop the topsoil from blowing away.

“But the planners had to be Montanans, with dust on their pants, able to sit down at the same table with the farmers, the stockmen, the merchants, and bankers; nor could they talk too fast or glibly. Better to get others to do the talking, and gently guide the discussion, as did Robert Clarkson, Teton county agent.” 

As you might imagine, as a “county agent” myself, I find this history interesting and self-affirming. But I think there’s also a lesson in this history. We know from research that my friends Leslie Roche and Mark Lubell (both at UC Davis) have conducted that farmers and ranchers learn best from one another. We know, also, that the cooperative extension system (of which county agents are the community-based representatives) can span boundaries between science and society. In my own experience, I feel like I’m most successful when I can help ranchers share ideas and develop locally-appropriate solutions to critical issues.

But I’m not writing this to declare my own self importance. Howard’s history suggests that what I thought was revolutionary in my own work is actually the way cooperative extension has always been supposed to operate! A homogenous approach to the wicked problem of climate change won’t work on the ground - what works for the ranchers in Teton County, Montana, today may not be the same thing that works for the ranchers in Placer County, California. The strength of the cooperative extension system has always been that it has embedded scientists and educators within these communities - men and women who had locally relevant scientific knowledge, connection with cutting edge research at land grant universities, and “dust on their pants.”

As public investment in applied research and cooperative extension declines, I fear that we may be losing sight of the importance of county-based research and extension. Our tendency recently has been to consolidate and combine functions that used to be handled at the county level. This consolidation often leads to a one-size-fits-all approach to extending scientific knowledge. Yet many communities, my own included, view the outside expert with skepticism. The county-based cooperative extension system isn’t perfect, but it may still be our best hope for helping our communities adapt to an uncertain future.