Several weeks ago Martin Brewington, agricultural technician on the Robeson County Extension staff, and I took 28 local farmers to south Florida for an intensive week-long educational tour. The farmers participating in this tour were an assortment of tobacco, row crops, vegetable, and livestock farmers from the county.

The primary responsibility of the Cooperative Extension Service is to help the people we serve learn more about how to deal with the major issues and problems they face. There are a variety of ways to help people learn, so they can properly make the decisions they need to make. Typically, Cooperative Extension offers a variety of educational meetings, conferences, workshops, field days, or on-farm demonstrations that provide timely information about new products, services, or methods to produce crops or livestock. Extension agents will often visit farms to help diagnose problems and recommend solutions. In addition, mass media outlets, such as this newspaper, newsletters, television interviews, or radio programs, provide specific information about a variety of topics. Another method that is often used to share information is educational tours, such as the one described in this column. With tours such as this, farmers are able to learn by actually seeing things that other farmers are doing that are directly related to the problems and issues they face on their own farms.

The farmers who participated in the trip to Florida were able to see examples of how other farmers have successfully diversified their farms to generate additional income for their families. In Hastings, Florida, we visited a potato farmer who actually makes specialty potato chips and markets them on the Internet and through convenience stores throughout the area. We visited a winery that was developed in a tourist region of Florida. Their wines were being marketed not only locally but also to the many tourists who passed through the area. Our farmers could do the same with any commodity they wanted to grow.

We visited an alligator farmer in Christmas, Florida, who grows and processes over 7,000 alligators each year. The meat is sold in Florida and Louisiana, and the hides are sold in Europe. There is little possibility that our local farmers will produce alligators, but the process this farmer was using to process, market, and distribute his product would apply to any specialty meat product that a farmer wanted to produce.

In Homestead, Florida, we saw how major nursery operations produce bedding plants for retailers like Home Depot and Lowes. The attention given to quality and customer preferences by this company relate directly to the strategies that would be used by local farmers if they wished to diversify into ornamental production.

In Homestead, we also visited a large herb operation. This company was producing herbs both in greenhouses and in open fields. The methods used for irrigation, potting medium, and production in their large greenhouses were identical to what a small producer might use to produce and supply herbs to local or regional markets right here in Robeson County.

In Apopka, Florida, we visited Agri-Starts, a greenhouse operation that starts its plants from tissue culture rather than from seeds or cuttings. This company selected the most desirable and most perfect plants and then removed a portion of the plant. Minute pieces of this plant were placed in small dishes with a growing medium, and the new plant was started by cell division, creating a new plant identical to the mother plant. As the new plant grew, it was transferred to a larger dish and then transferred to potting trays and grown to marketable plants within a greenhouse.

Those farmers participating in this tour saw a lot. It is impossible to share with you in this short column all the things they saw.

The production of foods and fibers in the United States is the largest, most efficient, and most essential business in our nation. Our local farmers play a major role in this production, but they are just one small component. It is important that they have a better understanding of the total system and how all components fit together to feed millions of people around the world. We were able to visit farmers and ranchers in other parts of the United States to see and to better appreciate what they are doing and how they are doing it.

Because of this tour, our farmers were able to see a lot of new and different things.

• Hopefully, they learned more about agriculture in other regions of the United States.
• Hopefully, they picked up a few ideas they can implement into their own farm operations.
• Hopefully, they gained some knowledge and skills about marketing and alternative development.
• Hopefully, they learned more about how agricultural research is conducted so they can better apply this research to their own farm operations.

I have no doubt that those participating in this tour will state that it was fun and it was interesting. But I would bet that each of them would say that it was educational and that they learned a lot from what they saw.

E-mail address: Everett_Davis@ncsu.edu

Mailing Address:
P. O. Box 2280
Lumberton, NC 28359-2280

Phone: 910-671-3276
Fax: 910-671-6278

Date Created 3/16/04