Safety third: Maintaining stakeholder attention

As a doctoral student, I was fortunate to have experiences interacting with rice and sugarcane growers at field days and workshops. These encounters helped guide my future Extension programming by teaching me about this stakeholder group and their learning style. I determined that many growers have relatively short attention spans (like me) and prefer hands-on activities to presentations when possible. At UF/IFAS I worked as an Extension Scientist specializing in pesticide safety. In that role, I was challenged to develop materials for a diverse group of agricultural producers on a topic they were not generally interested in. Growers want to know the latest yield trends, IPM techniques, and safety only after the fact and only as a necessity to be a licensed applicator. In this presentation, I will briefly describe my experiences as a graduate student. I will discuss how they led me to develop interactive ways to disseminate information on pesticide safety and how I was able to collaborate with other Extension professionals and research scientists. These collaborations were vital to my Extension programming as combining my messages on safety were incorporated into larger programs including presentations on the more desired topic areas.