Progress 09/01/24 to 08/31/25

Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience reached during this project period were primarily the undergraduate students at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and members in the Organic Agriculture Industry through the Organic Center. Changes/Problems:There have been some delays and interruptions in our plans of providing scholarships and internship opportunities to students due to changes in funding to the Orgnaic Center. The PIs will explore the internship opportunities within or outside the previously planned internship consortium. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Nothing Reported How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? Nothing Reported What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?Our plan for next year is to formalize our internship consortium to the extent that we can help recruit and place UTRGV students for important experiential learning in the organic sector. We also plan to meet in-person with the research team and students in the Spring.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? During this project period PI, Dr. Soti successfully offered the Sustainable Agriculture course, which enrolled at full capacity. As part of the course, staff from The Organic Center and the Organic Trade Association (OTA) delivered two virtual presentations via Zoom. These sessions covered a range of topics, including the history and status of organic agriculture, future directions in the field, and potential career opportunities for students. PIs have established a scholarship account through the UTRGV Scholarships and Enrollment Communication Office and are currently in the process of announcing the opportunity to eligible students. During the first year of this project, we began making some headway in identifying potential internship hosts for UTRGV students. While we felt ready to jump into the consortium development, meetings with our core advisors revealed that we should take a step back and re-examine what the process of student recruitment and selection should look like. We learned that there are some methods that make it easier for hosts to participate in this kind of program and tactics that will make the experience better for the intern. For instance, if we help gather interested applicants but allow the hosts to do the interviews and selection, then the chances of finding the best fit for both the host and intern are greater. When the intern does an interview with the host rather than us as a pass through, they get a chance to examine the culture of the host organization and determine whether it's an environment they'd like to join. We also learned that hosts can benefit from receiving a small stipend to help cover some operational expenses or travel to an outreach event, etc. This year we were able to host our own intern cohort with funding for specific activities in partnership with NRCS. This has allowed us to identify the components of the selection process that could be streamlined on our end to make it easier for hosts to select interested candidates. With all these learnings in mind, we plan to adjust our originally proposed strategy of execution of this kind of internship program. The original plan was to help UTRGV support students through internship opportunities each summer of this funding period. However, incidents outside of our control, with the shift of a new government administration caused serious delays and interruptions to our work, which made it impossible for us to complete sufficient planning to execute an internship program this summer. For instance, we had planned to travel to UTRGV to simultaneously host a planning workshop for this project and meet and engage students the Hispanic Farmers and Ranchers Conference that was planned to be held in McAllen TX. Sociopolitical changes in response to the transition of government and executed orders caused the event to be held elsewhere, removing the opportunity to simultaneously work with the PD and plan an interactive workshop with students at the event. At this same time, we had a USDA NIFA OREI grant terminated because of its misalignment with new administration priorities. This forced us into a spending and travel freeze while we pivoted our time and energy into closing out that grant and adjusting our organizational budget to accommodate the loss. This process took up a significant amount of time between April and June, hindering our ability to make much progress on our scope of work for this project. That said, we were able to complete our goal of conducting guest lectures, though we executed this remotely. In summary, despite delays and interruptions because of changes in our government funding, we were able to make progress in the development of our internship host consortium and protocols for its execution. We were also able to engage UTRGV students and share the benefits of organic farming to the environment, human health, and socio-economic wellbeing, as well as career opportunities that exist in the organic sector. We allocated our budgeted staff time, but did not spend our travel budget this year. This funding will be rolled over to next year for travel. Our plan for next year is to formalize our internship consortium to the extent that we can help recruit and place UTRGV students for important experiential learning in the organic sector. We also plan to meet in-person with the research team and students in the Spring.

Publications