Demand for locally-grown, organically produced food is rapidly increasing as consumer awareness grows.  Farmers are responding to this increased demand by increasing or establishing new organic production.  Extension educators are reporting an increase in demand for information on organic agriculture. The WORT project was conceived in response to a perceived need for research-based applied information on organic farming systems in Illinois.  Furthermore, the USDA Organic Transitions Program emphasizes the importance of outreach.  Thus, outreach activities must be an integral part of our project.

The WORT project is unique in its involvement of experienced organic farmers in defining the project and providing continual input on its focus and outcomes.  These farmers and other experienced practictioners need to be integral to our outreach efforts. We need to develop networks to easily share information and to strengthen farmer – researcher interactions.  One challenge will be to integrate grower experiences and site-specific information into our output. We have a range of audiences, including ourselves, our grower advisors, other researchers, students, administrators, Extension staff, funding agencies, consumers, gardeners, experienced organic/ sustainable growers, conventional farmers considering transitioning, and beginning farmers.  Not all these audiences will be able to be address with the same intensity.  Our primarily outreach audiences will be Extension staff, conventional farmers considering transition, and beginning farmers.

We also recognize that much of the research findings will not occur until late in the project.  Thus, some early outputs will be based on preliminary results, the experiences of the researchers, and our farmer-advisors.  These outputs will have the goal of providing information to our primary audiences early in the life of the project and to increase visibility of the WORT project.  Later outputs will be researched-based, presenting findings from our project in an applied format, understandable by our non-scientific primary audience.  All members of the WORT team, including the growers, will have an opportunity to review and contribute to outputs.

Outreach Strategies:

1. Press releases, whenever possible, on the project itself, activities, and findings.

2. Signage at the research site.  This would increase awareness of the site to people traveling on Windsor Avenue and could be used to direct people to more specific information available at the site itself.

3. An Organic/ Sustainable Agriculture Field Day.  The field day could also include other sustainable/organic activities on the south farms.  The field day could be in mid-June (Deborah has an Organic PDP in Springfield on June 28 that several of us will participate) when the cabbage/broccoli was growing and the wheat was still present.

4. Agronomy Day.  We will continue to participate in the Agronomy Day with the aim of actually having our site as a stop on the tour.  One possibility may be to rent a bus to bring people on Agronomy Day from the Crop Sciences Farm to the WORT site.

5. Develop FACT sheets and other short summaries of information on organic practices, questions, and research findings of interest to our audiences.  The first of these FACT sheets is on organic certification.  Suggestions of other topics will be encouraged.  The FACT sheets will be provided to Extension staff to assist them in responding to questions.

6. Encourage researchers to contribute to web-based information on biological farming systems in the three state project that Deborah Cavanaugh-Grant is directing in Illinois.

7. Develop a web-page for the project that has an outreach component and is linked to other appropriate web-pages such as ASAP.

8. Build researcher-grower based information using Wiki-ware (see Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) or similar web-based approaches that provide opportunities for community sharing of experiential- and research-based information.