Agricultural Extension and Climate Change Communication

Agricultural extension has evolved over the last 200 years from a system of top-down dissemination of information from experts to farmers to a more complex system, in which a diversity of knowledge producers and farmers work together to co-produce information. Following a detailed history of the evolution of extension in the United States, this article describes an example from the southeastern United States that illustrates how innovative institutional arrangements enable land-grant universities to actively engage farmers and extension agents as key partners in the knowledge generation process. A second U.S. example shows that private retailers are more influential than extension in influencing large-scale farmers’ farm management decisions in the midwestern United States. However, these private retailers trust extension as a source of climate change information and thus partnerships are important for extension. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been an important source of extension services for smallholder farmers across the world, and examples from the NGO CARE indicate that a participatory and facilitative approach works well for climate change communication. Collectively, these examples emphasize that the role of agricultural extension in climate change communication is essential in the context of both developed and developing countries and with both smallholder farmers and large-scale farmers. These case studies illustrate the effectiveness of a co-production approach, the importance of partners and donors, and the changing landscape of agricultural extension delivery.