Iowa State and FCS Agronomy Announce Agreement
January 14, 2010
FCS Agronomy and Iowa State Extension Announce Corn & Soybean Initiative Partnership
Back in December of 2004, Iowa State Extension created a program to partner with key leading agronomy retail partners across the state of Iowa called the Corn and Soybean Initiative (CSI). The fall of 2009 Farmers Coop Society (FCS) signed a formal agreement to become an Iowa State CSI partner.
Iowa State Extension is the local arm of the Iowa State University ag department. University research and information from well respected ag Universities like Iowa State has been the basis of most agronomy practices and management decisions since the inception of modern agriculture in Iowa. Iowa State Extension brought the research to the local level around the state. To gather this local information, the extension has worked with local farmer partners over the years and collected data in conjunction with other universtiy research to formulate the agronomic recommendations that in many cases we still use today.
Iowa State Extension has always filled the role of scientific research, teaching, information dissemination, and direct to farmer contact. Over the past 10-20 years, their role has changed to a degree. One main reason is that seed, chemical, and fertilizer manufacturers and distributors have grown in size, scope, and influence. Along with this influence, these manufacturers have done more and more of their own research in house. Along with doing their own research, they have also been increasing the amount of marketing and sales directly to farmers of their product. Often these companies have large resources of money to draw from to do marketing research, much more so than the Universtiy system. This has meant that the primary information source used to be the Universities, and now there are many information sources to choose from, including companies that have motivation to sell to the farmer. This motivation to sell a product or service to the farmer can sometimes lead to information that is not always completely objective. The university system on the other hand does remain objective. The other major change that has happened is in the University funding. Public university funding for agriculture has been gradually decreasing, resulting in program, personnel, and research cuts. Extension has been impacted greatly by these cuts, resulting in some fundamental changes in the extension system. This has spurred the development of the Iowa State CSI partner program. Iowa State Extension is very selective on CSI partners. They will only partner with organizations that have the farmers best interest in mind, like FCS. 
What Iowa State extension hopes to get from this partnership:
- Funding to do local research.
- Developing relevant research projects.
- Finding additional farmer research partners.
- Keeping the Iowa State Extension brand in front of farmers and helping them so they continue to see the value of the extension system.
- Training our FCS agronomy staff that interact daily with farmer growers so the information they disseminate is accurate, objective, and consistent with the university system.
- Create an avenue to disseminate information other than exclusively through the extension system (multimedia and other forms of communication).
What FCS agronomy hopes to gain from this partnership:
- Keep the University and Universtiy Extension system viable for the present and future since there is and will continue to be a need for objective, scientific based information for us to base our agronomic recommendations on.
- Agronomic training to help keep our agronomy personnel the best trained in the industry due to the increasing complexity and increasing risk in today's agriculture.
- The partnership should help meet the goal of the FCS agronomy team being well trained, a relatively objective information source, and show that our recommendations are based on scientific research and facts.
- Local research that continues to advance farming practices in our area, raising yields, minimizing risk, and ultimately increasing farmer's profitability.
Over the next few months and years to come, this relationship will continue to evolve to meet the needs of farmers in our area, the Farmers Coop Society agronomy department, and maintain the value of Iowa State Extension to our farmers. We are currently in the process of developing some local research projects, farmer educational events, and other unique ways to move this partnership forward in the future.
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