 Welcome to Shabuagin County government working for you. This is our monthly program sponsored by Shabuagin County and we tried to bring you the issues and the people that are controlling the activities of Shabuagin County government. I'm Dan Lamayua, County Board Chairman, co-hosting the program with Adam Payne, our administrative coordinator. This month we have with us our Shabuagin County Community Resource Development Agent. It's a long title, but it's a short name Dave Such. It's good to have you with us today Dave. Thanks Dan. I'm looking forward to this program today because this is a department that I know very little about and usually politicians don't like to admit that, that they don't know something about an issue, but since I've been on County Board, I've gotten to know you Dave a little bit with the program you did for the Village of Woosburg a few years ago, but I really am not real familiar with your department and so this is gonna be a learning experience for me today just like our viewers. So maybe you could just tell us a little bit about yourself first and the position that you have in the UW extension. Sure, just a little bit about me. Grew up about 40 miles south of here in Germantown and I think back in the 1950s and we had a family, my uncle had a farm, we lived adjacent to it and we were sitting up on this end moraine and we could see we were about 25 miles away from Milwaukee and over the years saw Milwaukee encroaching and probably that's why that experience provided me with some impetus to go into planning and work on long range planning programs. We'll talk a little bit later, seeing the sprawl encroaching from the south and now we're seeing it encroaching in Sheboygan County. So just growing up 40 miles south of here gave me those kinds of experiences. I went to school at Carroll College and UW Green Bay got bachelor's and master's degrees in planning. I did some time at Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission and Bay Lake Regional Planning Commission which Sheboygan County is in that region. And then about back in the 1980, joined extension as a similar position, community resource development agent that's quite a mouthful and also the department head and I was there for a dozen years before coming to Sheboygan County in 1993. And my wife who that was the whole reason for coming here really is the person I was going with was from Adele originally, Good Hollander, Pat Dolomis and we got married and we have a three and a half year old and she knew Sheboygan County was the best place to live and I would tend to agree. I've been here now eight years in the county and working with the local officials which is part of my, one of my responsibilities. And I find that to be true. Just some great people here and the quality of life in Sheboygan County is fantastic and as an extension agent, I have an opportunity to work with communities for maintaining and enhancing quality of life. You mentioned a UW extension and we're gonna say that throughout the course of this half hour program. I think there's probably a lot of confusion out in the community. I know I was confused for many years. What is the UW extension? What is the UW Sheboygan Center? Could you maybe just explain the functions of the office a little bit? Sure, we get those kinds of calls all the time asking about a certain course and they say we have to respond. Well, that's kind of our cousin, the two year campus. Back in the 60s, the two year campuses in the University of Wisconsin system were called extension but the county extension offices had been around for quite a while since about 86 years now, back to 1914. So we truly are the extension of the university and you might have heard of something called the Wisconsin idea that was going back around the turn of the century. The boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state and we're as extension agents to take the knowledge and information of the university and apply it to people's real world needs. Actually, extension got its start back in the days of Abraham Lincoln in the 1860s when Abraham Lincoln recognized that for this nation to be a great one they needed to link our transfer information on the part of the universities to what was then subsistence agriculture. People were just growing enough food for themselves and Abraham Lincoln said to make this a great nation we have to be providing food for the railroad engineer for the factory worker and things like that and that required transfer of information from the university setting to the people out in the rural areas and that's really how extension got its start. The morale land grant college act which was passed in 1862 transferred federal dollars to states to start building a research base to apply it to increasing food for one example and then developing this network. It was then in 1914 when Woodrow Wilson president signed the Smith Lever Act which basically provided money to transfer that information and create extension offices like ours. So we've got a long tradition primarily started in agriculture. It's since evolved in Wisconsin the university of Wisconsin system is the land grant college and we are part of this huge university of Wisconsin system we're a little unique because we have a relationship with the county. I think from the historical past you can see there is a linkage between government and education and some people say well why is the county government in the education business but there is this long standing tradition and reason behind why government and education partnered and that tradition continues on it's not just agriculture. Now fast forwarding to the year 2000 in the university of Wisconsin system we have the 14, our 13 four year campuses like UW Madison, UW Milwaukee, et cetera. We have 13 two year campuses like UW Sheboygan, UW Manitowoc and then there's this thing called extension which is comprised of four divisions one of which is public broadcasting public television and radio is part of that division. We have one continuing extension education which provides training for people professionals like in real estate to keep them current and upgrading their skills. There's another one called manufacturing extension which has our small business development centers which provides counseling for people looking to start a business or existing businesses that need assistance on perhaps marketing or management things like that. And then we have this thing called co-op extension which I'm a part of. In Wisconsin we have 72 county cooperative extension offices and each one is a little bit different in terms of the issues we address. We are a partnership between the county, state and federal government. Our salaries are funded 40% by the county in which we work and 60% by the state and federal governments but we work 100% in the county we're assigned to. So I look at it from an economic development standpoint as we always talk about economic development theory plugging the leaky bucket our tax dollars are taxed away to higher levels of government. This is one way state and federal dollars are coming back into these positions. The county gets for 40% you're getting a hundred usually 150% because we have a lot of night meetings we spend a lot of time working with the citizens of the county out there. So it's really a good economic development strategy. You're getting state and federal dollars back into the county. So. We'll pay for the first 40% and let the state and your business pay pretty overtime. How many employees do you have in the extension office? In Sheboygan County we have a total of 12 and that's about in terms of other state offices that's about middle of the range. Some extension offices especially in Northern Wisconsin have fewer those agents might focus more on tourism issues or forestry. Some of the larger offices have in some cases 60 employees. So we're not small we're not large we're somewhere in between. We're an urbanizing county Sheboygan with about 112,000 people. So we're the way we're organized we have four major program areas one of which is 4-H youth development and some people throughout the county have heard of one of these. They may not associate all the other things falling under this extension banner but we have the 4-H program. A lot of people went through the 4-H program as youth. We also have a family living program. We have an ag and ag business and natural resources program and then mine is community natural resource and economic development. So we started out primarily focusing on food production and we still do some of that but we've evolved into much more taking that and looking at the real world needs of people and trying to bring university knowledge to bear upon those issues and problems. In case you have these four basic groups or divisions in your office what type of services to these four different groups offer to the community? A very broad spectrum. Probably people that know anything about the extension office know us for our bulletins and we have bulletins just about on everything from that covers the waterfront, the full spectrum. So especially in the gardening and lawn care and things like that. We're known for those but we have- So if I, you're the guy I call when I have brown spots on my lawn in three months from now. Right, yep. And typically we get calls for people that don't know where else to go. The extension office is typically the place where we get those kinds of calls and we usually don't turn anyone away. We'll try and, if we don't have the answers locally we'll try and find them. We have this huge research base. I mean we have the whole entire University of Wisconsin system backing us up and it's been said for each position in a county there's about at least $80,000 of specialist backup. So we don't have to be the experts in all the areas. However, we have these specialists in Madison and throughout the university system that we can call upon to get people the answers to their questions and their informational needs. Forage. People, you said a lot of people have gone through the 4-H program. Right. Tell us a little bit about what we have in Sheboygan County. Well the 4-H program in Sheboygan County is one of the top five in the state of Wisconsin in terms of enrollment. We have almost 1200 youth actively enrolled in 4-H plus our two 4-H agents work with other youth through high schools and middle schools, grade schools. The 4-H program itself enrolls children youth from the age of six to 19. And like I said, we have 1200 youth actively involved. We also have, it's a family opportunity. We have about 468 adult leaders in the 4-H program and really 4-H is all about teaching life skills. And in fact I work with a lot of local units and government, many of those local officials went through the 4-H program. So what we're trying to do is teach leadership skills and job skills. There's opportunities through the programs. Like typically people think of 4-H projects at county fair. However, those are teaching life skills and also developing job skills on the part of these youths. So and speaking, public speaking skills, you name it. We look at it as probably a good investment of taxpayers' dollars from the standpoint. I think I saw some statistics that it cost about over $44,000 to send one youth to the Lincoln Hills Correction Facility and we only have a fraction of that budget for a fraction of one youth going to Lincoln Hills for our entire 4-H program. So we think it's money well invested, especially when you're making that kind of positive impact with 1200 youth each year. We feel it's money well spent. With only two full-time staff, people working directly to the 4-H, you have a lot of volunteers working for it. I'm sure you're always looking for more. What kind of a commitment do they need to make to work with the 4-H programs? Well, typically I said we have about 468 adult leaders and they're volunteering on the average about 80 hours per year. If we affect some type of monetary value on that volunteer time, let's even say minimum wage around $5 per hour, that translates to about 32,000 hours times $5 is about 187,200. If we had to pay those a meaningful wage, say about $15 an hour, the volunteer time that's devoted to the 4-H program is over half million dollars, about $560,000. And that's all, again, volunteer gratis. But it becomes a partnership again with the 4-H agents. We only have two and we have a large program. We use the multiplier effect, training these leaders and bringing their skills into play and for positive outcomes with the young people of our county. So, again, we're a small staff in that regard, but I think by using the multiplier and just the volunteer commitment on the part of the Sheboygan County citizens, we've been able to like say take the 4-H program and develop it into one of the top five in the state. Great. You gave a wonderful history lesson earlier on the roots of the extension and the focus on the agricultural sector. And I'm real proud that I have a grandmother who has a Century Farm on TT here in Sheboygan County. And I know that she's received services from your office in the past. Could you touch on a little bit some of the services that are provided primarily for the agricultural community as well as the value of the agricultural sector for Sheboygan County? We'll just give you a little background on the agricultural setting in the county. Most people realize that the family farms are diminishing and I just in fact looked up some statistics of our county. If we go back 100 years, 1900, in Sheboygan County, we had 3,572 farms covering about 307,600 acres. That's 90, then 100 years ago, that was 95% of the land area of the county. And the average farm size was about 86 acres. 100 years later in the year 2000, the number of farms, I said we had 3,572 in 1900. In the year 2000, we had 1,170 farms. So yes, the farms have diminished. The number of acreage also diminished down to 204,000 from 307,000, which is about 63% of the land area of our county. So about a third reduction in terms of land area devoted to agriculture, but the farm size actually increased. It's now the average farm size jumped from 1900 at 86 acres per farm to 174 acres. And I think that's a trend we're gonna continue to see with the larger corporate farms that are popping up. So from that perspective, it still is an important segment of our economy. I mean, land-wise, we're talking 60% of the land area. And also, there's 1,200 farms out there yet, and that's a significant part of our economy. Our dairy and livestock, we have two ag agents. One focuses on dairy and livestock, the other on crops and soils. So they're continuously working on increasing knowledge on the part of our farmers to keep them current with new production trends, keep them profitable. And that's very difficult in this day and age, but that's what our mission is, to try and keep them profitable. And providing all different things, new and innovative things. I know our crops and soils agent went to a conference and he found out about 15-inch cornrows. And we started doing some pilots in the county on that. And the savings that would have for farmers and also the increase in profitability on implementing a new technique like that. So that's really what we're trying to do is apply research from the university and bring it to bear upon our local needs here in the county. I'm sure a number of our viewers didn't recognize just how many farms we have in Sheboyin County. And you said 1,200 active farms. 1,200 active farms. Could you be a little more specific on the role they have on our economy, the value that they bring? Sure. And just maybe one focus, the dairy industry. Of those 1,200 farms, there's about 339 dairy farms in our county with about 26,500 cows. The average milk production per cow is about annual milk production is 17,500 pounds. And annually, that means the sale, milk sales in our county is about $174 million. So that's a significant part of our economy. When you take a look at total farm and farm related employment in our county, we have about 12,000 jobs. There's obviously 1,200 farms. And some of these farms are hiring additional people. Some are working even three shifts. And so we have about 12,000 jobs or 20% of our county's labor force is in agriculture or ag related jobs. So that's a significant part. And again, we have two people on our staff that deal with that, trying to keep those, that part of our economy profitable. Very good. What are some of the other services that you provide to the agricultural community? Well, it's not only the agricultural community, but we're seeing now, even though the number of farms has diminished, we're seeing more hobby farms, people buying, moving former urbanites, moving into the rural area, purchasing 35, 40 acres. They're not used to that amount of land. And they have this acreage and they wanna know, well, can we do something, develop some specialty crops? What about herbicides and pesticides and things like that? There's becoming more of a need for the rural hobby farmer in our county, providing information that we kinda just took for granted for the actual full time farmer. This information has to be transferred so that, in fact, urbanites that have moved out to the rural areas, it's been said, have been applying fertilizers 10 times the rates of the farmer. And they need to know that more isn't often better and we're seeing the impacts of that through increased nitrates in the groundwater and things like that. So we continue to have probably more of an educational role in the agricultural area than ever before with these smaller hobby farms popping up and people not having the background. So those people are also coming to our office for information about the brown spots on the lawn from May until October. We have a training program, our crops and soils agent has a program set up that they train master gardeners. We have a 65 volunteer master gardeners that come into our office from May until October and handle the calls. We generally take about 700 calls during that period on garden, lawn, tree, portaculture I guess is what you'd call it, those types of questions. So again, we only have one individual, he would just be spending all the time on the phone. So we again use that multiplier effect and train people who in turn for the training and expertise, they volunteer time for our office. So that works extremely well. Earlier you mentioned the family living program. Could you talk about that a little bit more? Sure. Actually family living was one of the early, just like the county agent or the ag agent got it started a long time ago when the food was being produced. There was a real concern about food safety and how to prepare the food and things like that. So originally the positions were called home demonstration agents, teaching people how to safely prepare food and that's evolved. We now, we had a home economist and that's the position has changed to a family living educator. That person is taking more in the food area, taking a look at more nutritious foods when people are more concerned about diet as we're aging. Also financial management has become an important program of the family living educator, helping people manage their funds better, especially when we're seeing elderly people, especially a widow that may not have had anything to do with the finances now is put in a position where they're suddenly in control. The husband passes away, they need some help in terms of how they set up the checkbook and how do they do the cash flow and things like that. That's what our family living program is focusing on. So, we've been around for 86 years. We haven't stood still. We continuously try to focus on the changing needs of our citizens in the county and that's what we're all about. We keep our ears to the track and try and keep current and provide relevant information to meet their needs. One of my favorite stores is Fleet Farm and my father-in-law always says if you can't find it there, you don't need it. And you've talked about such a breadth of programs and services. I'm sure our viewers have a much better appreciation for all the services that you provide. In your role, how do you determine what areas to focus on? Well, two ways specifically, all county extension offices, once every four years do a major needs assessment. We involve community-wide surveys, do focus groups, face-to-face meetings, get input from the citizens we work with or don't work with, trying to get input as to what the priority issues are. So once every four years, we do a major county-wide needs assessment. So that provides direct input to keep us on track. And then each of the individual program areas also are doing needs assessments internally with our programs to make sure that we're on tech. Oftentimes, some of these, it may not be that scientific. For example, when I started in 1993, the big cryptosporidium issue hit Milwaukee and I got a call right in 1993 when I started in Sheboygan County from a rural homeowner and said, is there cryptosporidium in our water and how will we know? That got me thinking about the possibility of doing some type of a groundwater education program. And I did some research I found at the time, 10 years ago, we had 10,850 homes in Sheboygan County on private wells. That's a significant number, about 27% at the time, we're getting the water from private sources. So we developed at County Fair, we provided free water testing. We also have, now over the years, developed more in-depth programs working with our 15 towns in the county to provide a whole host, 25 different tests for people to make sure that they have a safe water supply. So part of it was, the number of phone calls we get, things like that will also determine our program directions. Sandy. You talked a little bit earlier, Dave, about the reduction in number of farms and acreage being used for farming. Land use, planning, these things have gotten a lot of talk lately. Could you just, we're running out of time real fast here, but could you just talk a little bit about some of the planning activities you've done with different communities? Sure, my degrees are in planning, I work for professional planning agencies. When I came to Sheboygan County, I had a request to help people establish a vision, help towns, villages, and cities establish a vision where they want to be in the future. Recognizing in the past plans pretty much were a top-down thing, we needed to involve citizens in this planning process. So we initiated a whole bunch of public participation techniques like community-wide surveys, getting input, granted this is more qualitative input, but it's the foundation. A lot of people start with zoning and they say that is what we want to try and upgrade. Well, zoning is the enforcement tool to implement a plan which is based on people's values. If we don't involve citizens in determining that vision, that's the broad foundation which we need to establish first. So I've spent the last eight years working with about 20 of the 28 units of government in our county, getting citizen input into this visioning process. We wanted to talk today about smart growth and a lot of other things. We really don't have time to do that. Maybe in a month or two, we could get you back. And the county board has established an ad hoc committee to deal with the stewardship issue. We passed the stewardship referendum recently in Sheboygan County and we need to deal with that and smart growth fits right in with some of those stewardship issues, some of the zoning planning issues that you're involved with. I know you're gonna be on that committee. I'm on that committee. Our first meeting is January 31st on Wednesday evening. For about six months, we're gonna have a number of meetings to organize this. These meetings will all be open to the public. Public is welcome to attend and give their input and hopefully we'll have a public hearing on the same issues. So maybe after we get into that a little bit, we can schedule another meeting, another show where we talk about some of those issues and see where that committee is heading and what's going on with that committee. Next month, we just recently had a ground breaking for our addition to rocking all. The whole issue of downsizing our county facilities or healthcare facilities. After two cancellations because of snow storms in December, we finally had a ground breaking. Next month, Adam, if I'm correct, we're gonna have Gene Larabee back and talk about that project, what's going on, and some of the issues involved with that and the downsizing and the care that we can give to the residents. And a month from now, hopefully, we'll be into that project a little bit more. And then we'll look forward to maybe having Dave back in a few months and talking about smart growth, some of these plans that these communities have to develop in the next, what, 10 years? Right. They have 10 years to do that. And some of the issues with the stewardship referendum. Again, if our viewers have any comments about the show, if you have any suggestions for topics that you'd like us to discuss, any questions you'd like us to answer, you could reach either Adam or I at our office, phone number 459-3103, and leave your questions. We'll be happy to either get back to you or we'd be happy to answer the questions on the show and bring out to the viewers some of the answers. Thank you.