Recipient Organization
MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY
(N/A)
BOZEMAN,MT 59717
Performing Department
Agricultural Econ & Economics
Non Technical Summary
Our long-term goal in this five-year integrated project is to collaborate with the Southwest and Northern Plains Climate Hub staff and regional education and extension stakeholders to develop improved educational materials, modes of communication and issue expertise that will help in assisting farmers and ranchers to better assess the sources of past crop and livestock production losses due to weather and climate disruption as well as explore future projections for these causes of loss. This project will utilize a diverse team, including climate hub personnel, extension faculty, agricultural economists, graduate students, and two climate hub fellowships to develop and implement improved extension materials for communicating risks associated with weather and climate change. This will be achieved through focus groups that target a broad range of farmers and ranchers, including socially-disadvantages and minority-serving institutions, to solicit input on improving extension materials. The second phase of this project includes taking that information to develop new and improved models and materials for extension communication related to weather and climate change risks. The developed materials and models will then be communicated to key extension and stakeholder groups to expand and generalize the scope of this project. In so doing we will assist farmers and ranchers and those who serve them to better adapt to extreme weather variability and climate change.
Animal Health Component
(N/A)
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
(N/A)
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
Our long-term goal in this five-year integrated project is to collaborate with the Southwest and Northern Plains Climate Hub staff and regional education and extension stakeholders to develop improved educational materials, modes of communication and issue expertise that will help in assisting farmers and ranchers to better assess the sources of past crop and livestock production losses due to weather and climate disruption as well as explore future projections for these causes of loss.
Project Methods
Activity 1: Create and maintain opportunities to advance extension outreach and education efforts on weather and climate risk mitigation related to this project through climate hub fellowships and graduate assistantships.We will develop application and selection process and through Climate Hubs, MSU, UC-Davis, NCAT, ATTRA, eXtension and Lang Grant University networks extensively recruit for fellowship and graduate student applicants. Our extensive outreach networks should lead to excellent candidates for both programs. Recruitment and hiring efforts will include climate hub and other personnel from this proposal in order to align the skills needed for this collaborative effort with the fellowship candidates.Activity 2: Solicit input on better communicating climate risks.A series of around ten focus groups will be conducted with various stakeholder groups. The research team led by Dr. Kristal Jones and our extension personnel will carry out these focus groups across the regions and commodities of interest. These groups will be subset between California and Montana and will be split between rancher, beekeeper, and diversified dryland farmers that include minority and under-represented farmer groups. These sessions will also include other government agencies that participate in assisting farmers and ranchers to mitigate weather and climate related risks, including the Risk Management Agency (RMA), Farm Service Agency (FSA), and Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Based on the experience within this team, we have found that to be an effective use of time, each focus group will last between 60-90 minutes. Each focus group will comprise up to ten members from various of the identified stakeholder groups to maximize discussion within the group. The project team will strive for a diversity of characteristics among the participants. Based on the project research team's existing history and preliminary networking for this project in the eleven states, the focus group representatives will be identified through key contacts in the areas.Farmer and rancher participants will be encouraged to attend focus group meetings through an offer of a $30 honorarium available to participants taking part in a session. Focus group meetings will be held in local public buildings or at a separate meeting room if in conjunction with a related farmer or rancher conference/meetings. During the focus group sessions, key points will be written on a large flip chart; this allows participants to refer back to and elaborate on important topics. The sessions will be audio-recorded and transcribed. The full text provides the project team members with rich contextual information from each group. In contrast, the flip chart provides a concise overview of each focus group's important discussion points essential to the qualitative analysis (Denzin and Lincoln 2005). A brief one-page demographic questionnaire will be administered to each participant to gather individual data for cross-correlation to focus group findings.The focus group guide will address the general questions overviewed throughout this proposal; however, it will be semi-structured to guide the conversation while still encouraging the free flow of ideas and allowing the conversation to progress in directions unanticipated by the research team. Thus, the focus groups will be interactive, where participants will be free to talk with other group members. This is the focus group approach's value, as the group dynamic yields different types of information and insight than individual interviews or surveys. The focus group guide will be developed with feedback from the project team members, and therefore a final instrument cannot be provided here.Activity 3: Develop education materials and more effective communication modes for use by extension educators and relevant farmer and rancher organizations and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) committed to address climate disruption impacts on agriculture, in part, based on activity 2 above.Based on feedback received in Activity 2 above, we will develop and design various forms for educational publications to distribute through the networks established by the climate hubs, ATTRA, and extension. The project team includes a diverse set of extension professionals that have devoted much of their career to developing extension and outreach materials in response to stakeholder input. This effort will be complemented with the collaboration of the climate hub in order to deliver materials that reach a diverse range of farmers and ranchers. Efforts to develop these materials will be led by Belasco, Schahczenski, two collaborating climate hub directors (Peck and Elias), and key partner Julian Reyes. This team will work with climate hub fellows, graduate students, and remaining project participants (Fuller, Saitone, and Goodrich) to develop more effective risk management communication tools, especially directed towards managing rangeland and pasture, dryland crop farming, and beekeeping. During the development stage, these materials will be shared with extension and stakeholder networks to get feedback on their effectiveness.Activity 4: Provide both train the trainer education and provide virtual and in person webinars, videos, podcasts, story on weather and climate risk assessment to farmers and ranchers and agriculture service providers.We will deliver the following educational outreach events in order to educate users on best practices for utilizing the developed materials. These events will be delivered in a range of mediums that can be scaled to meet the needs of different audiences. First, we will conduct at least 8 Train the Trainer Events to interact directly with extension faculty within Montana and California. Workshops will be directed to a more general audience that will also be consumers of the developed materials and include agricultural industry leaders, amounting to around 8 events. Technology will be utilized to provide new and innovative ways for information from the climate hubs, in cooperation with the developed team, to better communicate weather risks and how to optimally utilize existing risk management tools.