In 2015, HMI focused on mentoring and supporting the agricultural educators in our program to help them work with agricultural producers. Funded by a grant from Western Sustainable Agriculture and Education, we have 34 active participants in the program.
Our goal was to have 34 agricultural educators training 2-3 agricultural producers each on a course or module for a total of 70 agricultural producers reached. However, we pursued additional funding for 5 more educators who were trained in Whole Farm/Ranch Planning. Of 34, 11 agricultural educators have trained/co-trained152 agricultural producers in various aspects of Whole Farm/Ranch Planning.
The breakdown of courses and/or modules the agricultural educators taught is as follows:
Throughout the year we used Instructure Canvas and Adobe Connect as our mentoring distance learning platform. We made sure that all webinars and mentor meetings were interactive, and anyone who handed in completed work from their agricultural producers received feedback. We recorded all webinars and mentor meetings and archived them for those who couldn’t make the sessions. The recordings allowed our trainer trainees to watch and listen and to be able to email mentors or peers with questions and provide input.
Overall response to surveys shows that there was high satisfaction rate among agricultural producers for these courses and modules ranging from 90-100% satisfaction. Actual behavior change in terms of created plans/drafts varied depending on subject.
Increased knowledge or confidence in developing plans remained high throughout the year as noted below:
In 2015, our agricultural educators had the opportunity to train several agricultural producers and in the process they were able to further their own learning. Once tasked with creating plans with agricultural producers, our agricultural educators began to see the different challenges in creating whole farm/ranch plans. We facilitated peer and mentor support through our webinars, on our LMS Instructure Canvas though the discussion forum and through email correspondence. This allowed the agricultural educators to ask questions, share knowledge and learn how they were going to complete their tasks with agricultural producers.
Our agricultural educators are from several different states, see the table below:
Our agricultural educators are associated with many different agencies which can be seen in the table below:
We surveyed all the agricultural educators in our program in early 2015. Here are the results:
In 2016, we will survey the participants to see how they have progressed over the last year, and see what opportunities we can provide. Our agricultural educators will continue working with agricultural producers to complete plans. Also in 2016, 9 more agricultural educators have committed to further their learning and train/co-train a minimum of 2 agricultural producers. We will continue our peer and mentor support using our LMS Instructure Canvas though the discussion forum and through email correspondence.