New Extension head finds Virginians like, need his agency

By JANE W. GRAHAM
AFP Correspondent

BLACKSBURG, Va. — Dr. Edwin P. “Ed” Jones joined Virginia Tech April 1, 2011 as head of the Virginia Cooperative Extension Service and in the days since has been traveling the state getting to know the people who work for him and the people for whom they work.
“The most clear thing I’ve learned,” Jones said in a relaxed interview in his office on the Tech campus “is people in Virginia care about Extension and they support it.”
Jones said that in his first 90 days on the job he has done a lot of traveling and listening.
He is now ready to begin working, using what he has heard and learned.
“I believe Cooperative Extension is needed as much or more than at any time in history,” Jones said during a recent interview. “Issues are very complex. Extension is a non-biased source to help deal with those issues.”
Jones stated that first goal is filling the 25 positions for Extension agents in the field that the Virginia General Assembly returned to the agency.
He hopes to be able to advertise these positions within the next two weeks.
Extension was the target of a prolonged and sometimes bitter battle in the last General Assembly session as lawmakers from urban and rural areas debated its future and its usefulness as they tried to cut state expenditures.
Part of the fallout from this turbulent time was the loss of a number of county agents in the field and Extension personnel on campus and at other facilities who chose to take early retirement.
Jones is an advocate of connecting the agency’s researchers and their findings with the farmers who need to know what the researchers have discovered.
“We need to tie research and agriculture together,” he said. “We need to look at all opportunities.”
Jones said that there are currently counties that do not have an Extension agent.
This leaves a real gap in the agricultural community as reported recently in the Virginia Farm Bureau News.
An article by Kathy Dixon in the June edition outlined the problems some farmers have experienced when they did not have a county agent to ask for help.
“In order to realize the benefit of agricultural research that is conducted at Virginia’s Agricultural Extension Research Centers,” she wrote. “You need a human being who can come out to the farm and tell you how you can apply that research.”
She was quoting Eric Whitesell, president of the Tazewell County FB. Tazewell County was without an agent for several years, the article stated.
Jones said that in time he will need to take a look at filling strategic positions within the agency on campus when the hiring of agents is done.
He has a broad understanding of the mission of Extension and of what it needs to do to help the agricultural community meet the goal it faces in the coming decades.
In a nutshell, that is to figure out how to produce 50 percent more food by 2050 to feed a rapidly growing world population.
“Cooperative Extension was established as a system dealing with the greatest economic engine in the country,” Jones said. He said this is made up of the families involved in farming and the youth.
“It’s all connected,” Jones declared. “These pieces are not separate parts. They are all connected: the well being of the community, the family, our environment and the economy.
“The way I look at it, we (Extension) are involved from production to consumption and a lot of things in between and around those.”
Jones praised the people employed by Extension and said he has had fun reconnecting with them and with the Tech community.
He earned both his masters and doctorate degrees in wildlife from Virginia Tech.
“There are a lot of hard working dedicated people in Extension,” he declared.
He acknowledged that over the past several years that has not been a person in his position for any significant period of time.
A result has been that the employees, during the time of the budget cuts, stepped back and did what they had to do (to keep the agency going) but did not feel like part of a community.
“I’m trying to reconnect and make people feel like they are part of an organization,” Jones said.
Jones sees another piece of his work as connecting with the people Extension serves, the people who have been called stakeholders in recent discussions.
Asked to define stakeholders, he said they are the partners and supporters of Extension including the agricultural community, local government, the 4-H community, family consumer sciences, and community viability and leadership groups.
He has tried to do this by going to as many field days and seminars and listening to people, learning what they think about Virginia’s Cooperative Extension Service.
In the next year, Jones looks forward to doing a better job of communicating the impact of what Extension does, putting it together and getting it out to the public.
He wants to build a more robust system of collecting and using these impacts and of being responsible to the agency’s funders at the local and state levels.
These are local and state government, he said, when asked to explain who they are.
He said he believes it is important to let them know what they are getting for the money they have allocated from tax funds.
“My biggest concern is what will happen with the federal budget,” Jones concluded. “I’m very optimistic about local partners and state support.”