For 100 years, Cornell Cooperative Extension has been fulfilling the university’s land grant mission by connecting academic research with community needs. Whether it’s helping farmers adopt the latest agricultural techniques or working with families and schools to combat childhood obesity, CCE has been engaged in a wide variety of educational outreach efforts involving food systems, natural resources, sustainable energy, 4-H youth development, nutrition and economic development.
In February, Chris Watkins became CCE’s new director, overseeing the extension’s 57 offices across the state. Watkins recently spoke with The Ithaca Journal about his role, the challenges of coordinating efforts for so many diverse regions, and how research-driven outreach has changed over the years. Here are some highlights from the interview.
QUESTION: How did the cooperative extension system originally emerge?
ANSWER: We’re 100 years old this year, nationally. It came out of a recognition that just gathering research and not applying it is not enough. You’ve got to have a mechanism to get the information into the right hands.
What Cornell does, which I think is remarkable, is we have a very close interrelationship with the research endeavor. So we fund faculty to do extension projects. The experiment stations at Geneva and Ithaca fund faculty to do research projects. But we also put our federal dollars together as partners to fund combined research and extension projects. And that is actually relatively unique within the U.S. Often, the extension and the research are kept quite distinct. And I think it’s one of the strengths of Cornell University.
