Food Camp Helps Kids Experience Farms

According to the U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance, three out of four consumers know nothing or very little about farming and ranching. That percentage is even greater for youth. The New Mexico State University Cooperative Extension created Food Camp for Kids, which offers youth between the ages of 9 and 14 the opportunity to learn about farming in their community. 

Valencia County has annual agricultural cash receipts of $76 million for livestock and $10.9 million for crops, according to USDA farm statistics. They have a wide variety of food production ranging from beef cattle, pigs and lambs, to fruit orchards, raspberries, and garden vegetables. Also, they produce products such as packaged meat, milk, honey, and flour.

“The idea for Food Camp for Kids came about with the understanding that many people are disconnected from where their food comes from, especially youth,” said Newt McCarty, NMSU extension agent in Valencia County. “We wanted to show them where their food comes from with actual experiences of seeing the livestock, honey and berry farms, orchard, and dairy that exist in their county.” Read about Food Camp for Kids.

Norman Pruitt Acting Director of the Equal Opportunity Staff

NIFA Director Sonny Ramaswamy announced that Norman Pruitt will serve as acting director of the Equal Opportunity Staff from May 15-Sept. 1. He has extensive experience in Civil Rights, Equal Opportunity, Human Resources, and Program Compliance.

Since 2004, Pruitt has served as NIFA’s Program Compliance Review Leader and an Equal Opportunity Specialist. He organizes and exercises leadership over, and provides technical guidance to, civil rights on-site compliance reviews, audits, legal cases, and investigations of Land-Grant Universities (LGUs) and other institutions that receive federal financial assistance. He has conducted reviews in 40 states/Territories of the United States involving 58 – 1862 and 1890 LGUs.

Prior to joining NIFA, Pruitt was employed for 27 years by the University of Maryland College Park, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, where he earned an M.B.A. in finance, M.S. in agriculture, and B.S. in journalism. He also held several faculty and administrative positions at the university.

He will have full authority to make decisions and conduct business for NIFA in the area of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity.

AFRI 2017 Foundational Program Soliciting Conference Proposals

NIFA’s 2017 Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) Foundational Program is soliciting conference proposals that focus on identifying opportunities and bottlenecks in generating, managing, and integrating data in a specific domain of the food and agricultural system. Research proposals will also be considered that apply or enhance big data activities, and efforts. Proposals will be accepted through the deadlines, as specified, for individual program areas.

These request for applications are part of NIFA’s Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics and Tools Initiative, launched at a summit in October 2016. At this event and through a web-based “ideas engine,” stakeholders from academia, industry, and government emphasized the need for maintaining standards to ensure that agricultural datasets follow “FAIR” (find able, accessible, inter-operable, and reusable) principles. Stakeholders identified multiple priorities to achieve these goals, including:

• Developing a culture that supports and rewards communities of researchers to build off one another’s datasets, standardize protocols, harmonize experimental designs, and ensure that datasets can be usable over the long-term to minimize the number of “orphan” datasets.
  
• Fostering private-public partnerships while addressing trade-offs among data availability, ownership, value, incentives for sharing, and privacy;
• Building a robust infrastructure that houses and provides open access to publicly-funded datasets; and
• Training a workforce that can manage, analyze, and manipulate large datasets.

Dionne Toombs New Director in the Office of Chief Scientists

Effective May 15, Dr. Dionne Toombs will assume the post of Director in the Office of Chief Scientist. She is no stranger to REE, having served as NIFA’s Director for the Division of Nutrition. There, she has provided national leadership for research, extension, and education programs, both within her division and the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) nutrition programs. Toombs worked closely with Dr. Ann Bartuska, Acting REE Under Secretary, to develop the Promise Zone Round 3 proposal and selection process.

Competitive Funding Opportunity Webinar

The webinar workshops provide an overview of the NIFA competitive grant programs to enhance the application success rate of eligible institutions. The two-part informational webinar is meant to enhance the application success rate of all, with a focus on tips for minority serving institutions, and is divided into:

• Session I (11 a.m.-12 p.m. EDT)
• Session II (1-2 p.m. EDT).
  

Event Details

When:  May 25 - 11 a.m. - 12 p.m. EDT and May 25 - 1 p.m. - 2 p.m. EDT

Participant Audio Phone via AT&T Connect:  1-877-369-5243 or 1-617-668-3633

Access Code: 0211403# 

Webinar Access Link