Engaging Minority and Culturally Diverse Audiences

Extension\u27s mission is to educate and disseminate research to all people, but minority and culturally diverse audiences are often difficult to engage. The article offers seven ideas to help Extension professionals engage these audiences. Learn to understand their culture. Interact with innovators and key leaders in the community, and understand the hierarchy. Identify and solve local issues. Be patient and persistent, and develop early success stories. Adapt the program to their culture, keep the message simple, and repeat the message. Look for win-win situations and financial incentives to encourage participation. Evaluate, revise, and repeat the program

Three Soil Quality Demonstrations for Educating Extension Clientele

There is a renewed interest in educating youth, Master Gardeners, and agricultural producers about soil quality. Three soil demonstrations show how soil organic matter increases water holding capacity, improves soil structure, and increases nutrient retention. Exercise one uses clay bricks and sponges to represent mineral soils and soil organic matter and how soil water is retained. Exercise two demonstrates how soil organic matter cushions the soil to resist soil compaction and improves soil structure. Exercise three uses marbles to represent how soil nutrients are retained by soil organic matter. These demonstrations are useful within a classroom or as field exercises

Soil Health Educational Resources

Soil health and cover crops are topics of interest to farmers, gardeners, and students. Three soil health and cover crop demonstrations provide educational resources. Demonstrations one outlines two educational cover crop seed displays, including the advantages and disadvantages. Demonstration two shows how to construct and grow a cover crop root and shoot display. Demonstration three offers several soil health websites, bulletins and books, and videos on growing and managing cover crops. These educational resources may be used to educate Extension clientele on soil health concepts

Forages for Horses Programmes

A survey by the American Horse Council in 1996 showed there were 6.9 million horses in the USA with 1.9 million horse owners and 7.1 million people involved in allied industries. The value of the USA horse industry to the gross national product is $25.3 billion. Nationally, 2.2$776 million per year. Most of the 48,500 homes with horses in Ohio have 2-5 horses with 1-2 ha of land. Many exercise lots and high-use areas are little more than mud lots. Since each horse needs a minimum of 0.8 ha for feed, many pastures and hay fields are over-grazed and poorly managed leading to soil erosion, nutrient management problems with excess manure, and water quality problems. Most horse owners have a need for basic education to help them make good decisions on pasture and horse management. The educational resources directed at the 263,500 Ohioans involved in the horse industry are minor compared to its size. The objectives of the Ohio Horse Program are: 1) To increase awareness, knowledge and skills for horse owners on managing hay fields and pastures to produce quality horse forages, 2) To change management practices of horse owners to produce higher quality forages by learning how to better evaluate, produce, store and manage quality forages, 3) To develop a curriculum and provide a notebook of indexed referenced material to all programme participants, 4) To establish a grass plot programme to compare forage varieties for yield and quality, and 5) To provide field day and pasture walk experiences