● “We're very good at talking about principles, you know, these principles of resilience for soil management …these principles of resilience for diversification …but we don't have that nuts-and- bolts research that exists in agronomy, for example, on how we address this particular problem in this particular crop. And a lot of farmers want that ... they want hard solutions to their problems , not just principles.” (R09) ● “ What we now hear from farmers is ‘I want to know about the economics. Tell me about how this benefits me and my financial bottom line’, which is tough to do when you're talking about something with so much uncertainty like climate change. But there's a great need and I think a great desire for that in the farming community, to hear the dollars and cents that are associated with these practices and how they can help the farms’ bottom line.” (R09) ● “I wanted to get into the economics of climate change because when you read about any environmental topic, it doesn’t matter what it is, within a paragraph or two, you’re going to start getting into the economics. Like ‘well climate change is a threat… why can’t we do something about it?’ Well, because the alternatives are costly …but it’s also costly to allow climate change to continue unabated. ” (R16) Leveraging Assets, Expanding Capacity, Connecting & Integrating Program Resources Many opportunities were noted where Extension could tailor, adapt, expand, scale, or complement existing programs to improve efficiency in delivery of climate and extreme weather programs. This includes leveraging, scaling and integrating across existing programs and geographic scales of delivery. ● To the question of whether Extension could and should be doing more with C/EW programs, one respondent replied “Oh, definitely, without a question. I mean, I think about the fact that we have a network across the United States in every state, every county or parish … our network, our reach, is huge. It's an untapped resource and how we can get our colleagues to be supported and doing this work nationwide is really important. Just thinking about the different ways that people are going to be affected by extreme weather events and heat waves and fires and smoke and hurricanes and floods ...and I could go on.” (R05) ● “ We need to fit it in more. So it's more central and our programming just kind of tied in where we're having this climate change discussion in 4-H and in agriculture and most any programming ...we're in. It just needs that connection, it touches on everything that way. ” (R07) ● “There are so many ties to different programs that Extension does, but to have a running thread of climate change and extreme weather throughout those programs would be very powerful. ” (R05) ● “I mean, just across everything to be able to have some sort of [climate] component in there just to bring more of an awareness of it. ” (R10)
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