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Impact Report

For plan Plant Management Systems: Urban Horticulture (Otero County)
Date October 23, 2009, 6:31 pm
For Objective Short-term Show short-term objectives
Impact Report Urban Horticultural Inquiries to the Cooperative Extension Office. The agricultural agent recorded 1,208 agricultural inquires for the past year and feels strongly that one of the Cooperative Extension Service’s greatest impacts is the one-on-one service we provide to urban horticulturists who walk in, call in, or E-mail the office with questions on varieties that grow best here, insects, plant diseases, weeds, urban wildlife management, plants’ water needs, our alkali soils, and damage done to plants by ignoring the factors that make up our particular growing environment. Certainly more people are reached in public presentations but, these programs cannot come close to the value of the personal attention and abundant information provided by NMSU and the Land Grant University system that is now available at the touch of a computer keyboard to the agricultural agent serving those clients that contact the Cooperative Extension Service office. Even to those clients who are not new to the county, if a weed, or insect, or plant disease is not know by name it is almost impossible for the client to find any information on the Internet or elsewhere, but because of the training provided for the agricultural agent and resources made available, especially the ready access to the NMSU Extension Specialists, problems can be identified and quickly researched to provide timely University-research-based information for the urban grower as well as the larger production grower. At no other place can a person walk in without an appointment with a insect, plant disease, or weed, have it identified and receive a virtual library of information for its management in their garden/landscape environment within minutes. With the growing interest in cultivating home gardens to stem the tide of a tenuous economy, the ready availability of the agricultural agent at the Cooperative Extension Office is invaluable.