Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
Our project will use climate analogs - locations whose current climate is similar to a target location's future climate - as a convening tool to facilitate dialog amongst current and future Extension professionals from paired locations across Climate Hub regions regarding concrete, actionable information for specialty crop climate adaptation. Analogs will be used within an immersive Academy experience to prepare agricultural educators, early career professionals and students via peer-to-peer learning dialogs, integrative knowledge assimilation, and applied projects.Through this Academy, we will overcome a critical gap preventing climate change preparedness in the agricultural community - the idea that individuals will act if they receive the right "missing" climate change information and tools - an educational approach that has been shown repeatedly to be insufficient in complex situations where strategies and outcomes remain uncertain.Through a NIFA-funded CAP (2017-68002-26789) focused on US fruit and vegetable systems, our team developed a climate change analog tool and introduced it to nearly 100 specialty crop Extension professionals from across the country. We then piloted a facilitated dialog with 10 paired Extension professionals in the Southeast and Southern Plains Hub regions to explore the potential of analogs to facilitate actionable information exchange for climate adaptation. Building on this demonstrated interest, we propose to scale up this pilot dialog into a national train-the-trainer program partnering Extension with the USDA Climate Hubs in the major US specialty crop regions.Our goal is to build Extension and Climate Hub capacity and expertise to catalyze climate change adaptation in US specialty crops.
Animal Health Component
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Research Effort Categories
Basic
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Applied
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Developmental
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Goals / Objectives
Our overarching goal is to build Extension and Climate Hub capacity and expertise to catalyze climate change adaptation in US specialty crops. This will be accomplished by leveraging the strength of the Extension system in successfully encouraging agricultural producers to adopt new practices and the strengths of the Climate Hubs in their explicit focus on climate change considerations. Our specific objectives include: Objective 1: Develop, establish, and refine a train-the-trainer program - the Specialty Crop Climate Change Extension Academy (Academy) - using innovative curriculum and methods to improve the effectiveness of climate change extension programming for specialty crop producers. Objective 2: Develop a diverse and skilled workforce responsive to the Hubs' priorities and needs via a training cohort including current specialty crop Extension professionals, graduate student interns, and early career professionals. Objective 3: Enhance the connectivity between Extension and the regional USDA Climate Hubs to better serve the nation-wide specialty crop industry in climate adaptation.
Project Methods
Recruitment and Selection of Trainees for the Academy. We have an existing list of nearly 100 specialty crop extension experts from throughout the US who participated in one of the early 2022 webinars described previously who expressed interest in learning more about climate analogs. We assembled that list by requesting recommendations from University Extension Ag Program Leaders and through personal referrals from our own collaborator networks. We will build on this initial pool of potential participants through outreach and referrals from the regional Climate Hubs, the NOAA RISAs, USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) State Coordinators, and other personal referrals. We recognize that not each of these individuals already identified would be able to commit the time necessary to participate in the Academy, but given the uniqueness of specialty crop production systems and the stipend we are providing we expect to be successful identifying 20 extension trainees nationwide for the cohort. We will reserve, recruit, and select a minimum of 30% of the trainee positions for individuals from diverse or under-represented backgrounds, one from each of the Hub regions. Given the amount of diversity within specialty crop producing communities in many regions of the country, focused recruitment of specialists who serve small and diversified farms (e.g. urban produce farms) and producers from under-represented communities will be prioritized. We anticipate added value in the Academy dialog through an approach that enhances cohort diversity.Summer graduate interns will be recruited as a national cohort in years 2 and 3 of the project, and housed at WSU, UM, and UF under project co-PI's. These students may come from the host institution, or could serve in a summer-exchange with their home institution. These students will participate in an abbreviated version of the Academy, with the focus on exposure to climate analog facilitated dialog-based learning through an immersive summer experience.Dialog-based peer learning. Shifting from knowledge to climate action in specialty crop production systems necessitates that we transition from an information deficit model of outreach to a dialog-based peer learning model that emphasizes interpersonal exchange of knowledge and experiences. While it became common-place during the pandemic to share information-based content via virtual platforms, we will emphasize and use a dialog-based knowledge and experience sharing model in the Academy through both virtual workshops and in-person activities. Even when we "share content", we'll limit webinars (e.g. virtual lectures) and instead use interactive and virtual hands-on experiences, facilitation prompts to aid discussion, and ultimately "virtual flipped classroom" techniques. Trainees will gain content expertise they can use in future educational activities, but as importantly they will gain skill in facilitating dialog-based learning through both virtual and in-person contexts. This approach builds off successful peer-to-peer learning networks already operating in the Climate Hubs including the Drought Learning Network (DLN) and Climate Adaptation Fellowship programs.Customized Analogs. We will develop customized analogs applying the statistical approach followed by Chaudhary et al. (2022), which was based on Mahony et al. (2017). This approach calculates the statistical distance between the target county and all other counties in the variable space and identifies a set of "acceptable" analogs - analogs close enough in variable space to thetarget to have a meaningful conversation. As Chaudhary et al. (2022) noted, the analog set is sensitive to the set of variables used, and therefore it is important to develop context specific analogs. For this reason, we expect that we will need to customize the analog for the focus question identified in each regional Hub. This may involve the inclusion of additional relevant variables (e.g. soils) in the analog calculation than currently used and result in new analog locations. The platform and infrastructure for this already exists. The postdoctoral associate will lead this development, and provide training opportunities for graduate interns.Study Tours. Study tours are the ultimate immersion in dialog-based peer learning as the context of a place-based tour facilitates interrogative discussion and sharing of experiences between participants. Each trainee will both host and participate in a tour, as insights will be gained by both hosts and participants as the context and management decisions and strategies deployed at the host site are discussed and visualized. We will facilitate deeper discussions for our study tours by preparing participants with the site-specific analog target-pairing analysis and preliminary discussion provided in the analog pairing workshops. We will strengthen the character of these study tours by providing customized analog information, but also by diversifying participation by including summer graduate interns / post-docs, trainees from diverse and under-represented backgrounds, Hub staff, and project team members. During the tours, participants will engage with producers and industry personnel from the analog location.Climate Hub Outreach Projects. Each trainee will commit to completing a regional Climate Hub-focused outreach project targeting the regional Hub priorities as part of the requirements for graduating from the Academy (https://www.climatehubs.usda.gov/hubs/2022-hub-priorities). The purpose of these projects is to solidify the learning experience with a practical output that will contribute to the body of knowledge housed at the Hubs, to address a specific priority within each Hub Region, and to nurture the long-term relationship between the Hub region and the extension specialist. Projects can be products or activities, but should deploy methods and strategies learned during the Academy and should target specialty crop producers in their Hub region. Projects that consider collaborating and sharing of cross-regional insights gained during the Academy and that target valued transfer of actionable insights will also be encouraged. Activities could also include significant contributions to Climate Hub peer-to-peer learning networks that nurture and enhance interactive dialog for decision-making such as the Southwest and Caribbean DLNs (https://dln.swclimatehub.info/) and Climate Adaptation Fellowship program (https://www.adaptationfellows.net/). These contributions could have long-lasting impacts on the regional Hubs, engage producers in active educational programming during the project, and enhance cross-region learning dialogs.Specialty Crop Climate Change Extension Academy (Academy). As part of the extension specialists trainee program, participants in the program will attend at least 8 of the following training workshops that will comprise the pilot Academy. The majority of these workshops will be held virtually throughout the course of the year to allow trainees to interact prior to the travel-based study tours, as well as to offer the necessary training they will need to complete the program. One option trainees will have for their outreach project is to develop their own workshop module.