Ross Butler, lanky and laconic, is waiting with a sheaf of papers when Denise Schwab parks in front of the Blairstown Public Library. It’s midmorning and Ms. Schwab, a beef specialist with Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, has come down from her office in the Benton County seat, Vinton, because Mr. Butler wants advice about meeting the nutrition needs of his 110 cows and 75 calves in a drought year.
Even as many cooperative-extension programs have followed Americans off farms and into cities (see related article, Page A1), agricultural extension agents like Ms. Schwab continue to transmit research findings from land-grant campuses to more traditional users in their state’s fields, forests, and towns. As one of six extension beef specialists, she’s responsible for 16 counties in Iowa’s northeast quadrant—counties that reach as far up as Minnesota and as far east as the Mississippi. They include some of the state’s best farmland as well as some of its toughest. The questions that come to her—by e-mail and phone, in one-on-one consultations and at meetings—cover topics like farm management, facility design, pest control, water quality, and more.
Mr. Butler, like just about every other farmer here, was significantly affected by this past summer’s severe drought, ending up with a much different mix of potential foodstuffs than he would normally have.
He was able to cut less good alfalfa hay than usual, and early on he chopped up whole fields of drought-stressed corn plants, bagged the result, and is letting it ferment in the field as silage that his herd of mostly Angus cows will eat to supplement the hay. He also has oatlage—silage made from oats—and some inferior hay that, because of the drought, he was allowed to cut from fields in a federal conservation program.
Mr. Butler sent samples of everything he cut to his feed salesman, who sent back pages of data that Ms. Schwab will use to compute caloric-energy values that she’ll add to a feed library. They’ll be available for the farmer in future years and also bolster her collection of data for the whole region. They start talking recipes—Mr. Butler is thinking of mixing one part good hay, one part oatlage, and four parts hay from the conservation fields, and then serving the cows a blend of that mix and corn silage.
Ms. Schwab studies the sheets of raw data and does some back-of-the-envelope calculations. “This is probably a little rich for second trimester,” she says—keeping in mind that many of the cows Mr. Butler is feeding are due to calve at the end of March. They discuss the pros and cons of other possible food mixes. “I assume,” she says, “that when you tell me your cows are condition-score five, they’re really five-and-a-half or six” on the nine-point scale that beef producers use as a rough measure of an animal’s marketability. Mr. Butler looks down at the library table with a modest smile and agrees that, yes, that’s probably the case.
“A lot of producers are worriers,” Ms. Schwab says on the drive back up to Vinton. “It helps to know how they manage their herd. Most of the time we don’t have that luxury. When I’m dealing with people who are three hours away, there are a lot more phone calls.” But Mr. Butler’s farm is comparatively close, and she’s visited often enough to know that “he treats his cows like babies, and he’s probably more generous with the feed bucket than he needs to be.”
Understanding farmers is one of the more interesting challenges of her job. “It’s typical of most farmers not to ask for help until they absolutely have to,” she says, even though if they had called earlier they might have had more options. Even when they absolutely have to call, the first question a farmer asks might not be the one he or she really wants answered, so Ms. Schwab has become a careful listener. “You have to diagnose the situation,” she says.
“It’s all about the relationships. Once people know who you are and have your phone number, they’re going to call you directly.” Men, she says, are often reluctant to discuss a problem, although she says they’re accustomed to dealing with women in all facets of agriculture. Still, she says only a few women “are the major decision makers” on farms around here. “More are co-decision makers.” But many of the co-decision makers come to her workshops. As for the men, “when they get the harvest done early, they feel like they need to do some recreational tillage,” she jokes.
Guides on the Side
In a typical year, Ms. Schwab will drive between 10,000 and 15,000 miles, talk to as many as 1,500 people in meetings and educational programs, give advice by e-mail or phone to 150 or so, and consult face to face with upward of 30. Over the years, she says, budget cuts have reduced the number of university extension employees from 300 to about 150, although many counties, including Benton, have well-supported extension programs of their own that work closely with the university’s. Ms. Schwab is a veteran of several reorganizations.
All the university’s extension programs—in agriculture and natural resources, community and economic development, families, and industrial research— are paid for partly with federal money. Ms. Schwab says the agriculture programs have moved from dispensing expert advice to helping farmers evaluate information and work through possible alternatives on their own.
A farmer must keep in mind both the pragmatic—Mr. Butler, for instance, does not have a scale for weighing what he’s feeding his cows, and has only rudimentary options for mixing—and the unpredictable, like weather patterns and world commodity prices. “There’s never one correct answer,” Ms. Schwab says, only choices that are better and worse given a farmer’s particular situation.
Ms. Schwab grew up in Manning, in western Iowa, and early experiences in the local 4-H program sparked her interest in farm animals. In high school, she was told she had to take home ec rather than ag, but Iowa State welcomed her as an animal-science undergraduate. She has worked in the extension service since she graduated from the university. She’s married to a farmer and truck driver, and she’s as likely to spend vacation days working on their farm as anywhere else.
Her job, she says, is about half proactive—she organizes educational workshops during the winter months, when farmers have time to attend meetings—and half reactive. She gets a panicky call from a beef producer probably once a month, she says. “In some cases it really is a critical situation. In other cases they just think it is.”
A few weeks ago, for instance, Scott Birker called on her cellphone just as she was pulling into Ames for the university’s annual extension conference. Two-thirds of a 90-cow herd—one of several on land Mr. Birker farms with his father and his uncle—had fevers and weren’t eating.
Ms. Schwab asked a long series of questions and concluded that Mr. Birker had a blue-green-algae problem in a creek that would normally not cause problems but was affected by the drought. “Blue-green algae can produce a microtoxin that leads to diarrhea in cows. He fenced the creek off, and the next day they were starting to do better,” Ms. Schwab says on the drive out to the Birker farm. There she and Mr. Birker discuss how a new structure is working out—a modern shed with an angled roof called a “monoslope” that keeps summer sun and winter snow off the animals while they bulk up before being sold.
Many of extension’s biggest fans, she says, are farmers eager to improve their business by trying something new, whether it’s a facility design or calving in the fall as well as spring, the traditional season for calving. The Birkers, she says, “are pushing their land mass to the max” with both dairy and cattle herds. “My dad thinks outside the box a lot,” Mr. Birker says with a grin when he clambers out of a small loader with which he’s been cleaning manure and old bedding out of the new finishing shed. “He’ll try anything. Twice.”
Mr. Birker, a board member of the local cattlemen’s group, has also been involved in a young-producers program that Ms. Schwab organized to help members of the millennial generation connect with each other and with extension efforts. But they end their conversation talking about something thoroughly traditional—a pie Ms. Schwab has volunteered to bake for a benefit auction. “It’s all about the people, the relationships,” she says when she’s back behind the wheel. “We’re all about keeping families and communities viable with agriculture.”
Afterward, driving up a dirt road a couple of fields over from the monoslope, Ms. Schwab spots a trio of calves frolicking outside the fence line. She fishes for her phone. “You know you’ve got calves out in your oats?” she asks Mr. Birker. She laughs, then says goodbye and hangs up. “He says they sneak under the fence by the creek. They’ll go back in as soon as the food truck comes.”