Extension ExPress, September 2024

Director’s Message

Going Digital

I first realized the need for University of Idaho Extension to increase its digital presence on a Sunday morning in 2010. I wanted to quickly learn how to decorate a cake with fondant for my daughter Jana’s wedding reception. But when I scrolled through the many YouTube videos on the subject, none of them were produced by an Extension service, and I had no way of knowing if the sources of the tutorials could be trusted. The Cooperative Extension Service represents a proven brand with a record of success dating back to 1914, when Congress created it through the passage of the Smith-Lever Act. In recent years, we’ve made great strides toward delivering content in a more convenient way for clients who are walking into our county offices less frequently. We’ve begun to make our popular programs available both in-person and online, enabling stakeholders to participate when, where and how it’s most convenient for them. Through online offerings, we’ll reach new clients and save time and transportation, while also expanding the reach of our expert specialists. “Our main focus is not to remove or stop the in-person programming, but rather to make some of that programming more widely available,” explained Erin Doty, our director of Extension Publishing.

Doty wears a second hat based on an idea she pitched during her job interview. She’s also our director of Extension online education and has been busy adding online options for existing programs and creating new online courses. These digital programs are offered under the umbrella of Continuing Adult and Professional Education (CAPE), which is a central U of I initiative aimed at offering more nontraditional education. UI Extension Educator Ron Patterson, Bonneville County, oversees an Idaho Master Gardener program that’s offered online through CAPE, making it available in three counties that lack an Extension educator with the expertise to facilitate it. Our IDAH2O Master Water Stewards program, which trains volunteers to adopt a part of a stream to monitor, is now available online, which has significantly increased participation.

We recently launched Build and Grow Your e-Business, a new program geared toward helping individuals establish or enhance their business presence in the digital landscape. We’re close to rolling out Fish and Family, an online program aimed at helping parents increase their children’s fish consumption. Bridget Morrisroe, an Extension educator in Ada County, is director of the U of I Diabetes Prevention Program, which is now offered online. Other digital programs in the works include e-Potato, which includes digital content to teach middle-schoolers about Idaho’s most famous crop, and 4-H training modules that will be used for training UI Extension 4-H Youth Development volunteers. Furthermore, Siew Guan Lee, a family and consumer sciences Extension educator based in Twin Falls, collaborates with University of Georgia Cooperative Extension on a virtual cooking club called Kids in the Kitchen.

In addition to heightening our emphasis on offering virtual programs, we’re also actively teaching stakeholders skills of importance in an increasingly digital world. Amber Smyer is manager of our statewide Digital Economy Program (DEP), which seeks to reduce the digital divide — or the gap between those who have access to the internet and reliable devices and those who do not. The Idaho Legislature authorized $1.3 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funding toward the three-year DEP program, which launched in November 2022. DEP includes a Remote Work Certificate course in partnership with Utah State University Extension that offers individuals training to help them succeed at working remotely. This program helps participants find good jobs without leaving their rural communities, which also strengthens Idaho’s small towns. DEP’s Certified Remote Work Leader program teaches employers how to effectively develop a remote work program. The DEP Digital Skills curriculum prepares participants to earn digital learning certificates through learning modules and proctored assessments, facilitated by Northstar Online Learning. The DEP also placed AmeriCorps members as Digital Navigators in rural communities and with tribal partners, where they’re tasked with teaching digital skills to underserved populations. A second cohort of eight Digital Navigators is scheduled to begin work in rural Idaho soon. Finally, DEP recently rolled out Build and Grow Your e-Business, which trains participants to succeed with virtual sales, from crafting an effective brand identity to developing a website and business plan.

The content we provide through Extension remains as relevant today as it was more than a century ago. By embracing technology, we’re ensuring we’ll continue to be one of the most trusted sources of educational content covering a wide variety of areas. Though we’ll continue to offer in-person workshops and events, we’ll also reach a broader virtual audience, who will learn essential skills from the comfort of home.

Barbara Petty
Associate Dean and Director
University of Idaho Extension

Extension Impact

Boosting Trout Consumption

A University of Idaho-led study aims to test a time-honored strategy among parents seeking to motivate their young children to try new foods and expand their palates.

Annie Roe, associate professor and Extension specialist within the Margaret Ritchie School of Family and Consumer Sciences, is principal investigator of a five-year, $1.13-million U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant evaluating how repeated exposure to food served with a dose of knowledge can influence dietary habits. Roe’s grant also funds two other prongs — a trout sensory evaluation in partnership with Washington State University (WSU) and a study assessing trout consumption in homes.

Roe and her colleagues have set a high bar for the repeated-exposure component, attempting to hook 4- to 6-year-olds who attend local childcare facilities on eating trout. Specifically, they’re serving strains of trout bred in collaboration with U of I’s Aquaculture Research Institute (ARI) to thrive on plant-based feed, including one trout strain containing roughly 30% higher levels of essential omega-3 fatty acids.

On a weekly basis over 12 weeks, participating children are fed poached trout fillets, served cold with no seasoning. Prior to receiving the trout, one group of children hears a child-centered nutrition phrase repeated three times — “Trout helps your brain so you can learn and play.”

The researchers hypothesize that the children who hear child-centered nutrition phrases will be more apt to eat trout than those who are repeatedly served trout without messaging. Furthermore, they anticipate trout consumption will be lowest among a control group of children who are served trout only at the beginning and end of the study but are invited to play games with the research team, eliminating the potential for bias related to the excitement of participating in a study. The project’s repeated-exposure component is entering its second and final year and will include 99 children evenly divided into the three groups.

Trout are an important source of protein, vitamin B and omega-3 fatty acids, which are important for brain development and heart health. Idaho is the top producer of trout in the U.S., raising about 70% of the nation’s domestic trout supply.

“In every one of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans we come out with more evidence that yes, we should be eating more fish every week,” Roe said. “We’re starting with kids because building those dietary habits early on and those taste preferences early on can set us up for future success.”

The researchers are administering the NIH Toolbox for Assessment of Neurological and Behavioral Function to measure potential improvements in children’s cognition and emotional wellbeing due to their trout consumption. Furthermore, parents are asked to complete a survey of their child’s emotional wellbeing.

Carolyn Ross, a professor of food science at WSU and director of its Sensory Science Center, is co-principal investigator of the grant and is leading the sensory component. She has already tested a cohort of 51 children and will next evaluate sensory preferences among adults. Ross is feeding participants three types of trout — ARI’s high omega-3 strain raised solely on plant feed, that strain finished on fish meal and another ARI strain with normal omega-3 levels.

The sensory evaluation should generate important consumer data about the ARI strains.

“What we’re trying to capture is if there is a difference in the texture, in the fishiness, in the flavor and in preference among these three types of trout,” Roe said.

Roe is director of Eat Smart Idaho — a UI Extension program that provides nutrition and physical activity education for Idahoans with limited resources. She will recruit Eat Smart Idaho participants to partake in the trout study’s at-home component. As part of the grant, UI Extension is developing an online curriculum called About Trout! Pond to Plate offering 12 lessons in trout nutrition. The curriculum will cover topics such as where to catch or buy trout, how to cook trout, food safety, how to use child-centered nutrition phrases to encourage children to eat trout and nutritional benefits of eating trout.

Families in northern Idaho and the Magic Valley participating in the at-home component will be divided into groups receiving 1) only Eat Smart Idaho curriculum, 2) both Eat Smart Idaho and About Trout! Pond to Plate, 3) access to both programs plus a supply of trout and 4) access only to Eat Smart Idaho plus a supply of trout. The study should provide insights into how nutritional education and access to healthy foods such as trout affect eating habits of both parents and their children, thereby improving brain health.

“It’s kind of having this whole package of helping parents to introduce foods and use repeated exposure and those child-centered nutrition phrases in the home,” Roe said.

The grant will support five graduate students at U of I, including three who are set to graduate next summer with master’s degrees in nutritional science.

ARI has partnered with USDA since 2000 to conventionally breed trout capable of gaining weight rapidly on a plant-based diet, positioning the industry to operate sustainably without mining oceans for fish meal. The USDA estimates three-quarters of all strains of farm-raised rainbow trout in the U.S. possess some of the plant-based-diet genetics from Hagerman.

The ARI/USDA trout strains can gain more than a pound of weight in roughly six months on a plant-based diet, which is faster than it takes for conventional trout to gain a pound on fish meal. The ability for trout to thrive on plant-based feed is a complex polygenic trait, which the researchers serendipitously discovered is also linked with elevated omega-3 fatty acids. Matt Powell, interim associate dean of research and director of the Idaho Agricultural Experiment Station, has been collaborating with the USDA Trout Grains Project breeding program for several years.

“We have taken this carnivorous trout and essentially made a vegetarian out of it,” Powell said. “We are improving the sustainability of growing fish by feeding them plant protein sources.”

Researchers involved in the trout nutrition grant — Anne Roe, Matt Powell, Shelly Johnson, Siew Guan Lee, Jacob Bledsoe, Jenna Gardiner, Jacqualine Davis, Hannah Kindelspire and Jolene Whiteley from U of I and Ross and Rachel Potter from WSU — presented a poster on the project, “Increasing Trout Consumption in Young Children and Families for Cognitive and Mental Health Benefit: Year One,” during the Society of Nutrition Education and Behavior summer meeting.

The trout nutrition project is funded over five years with $1.13 million from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture under award No. 2023-69015-39605, of which 100% is the federal share.

Helping Youth Meet Potential

Dairymen in the Magic Valley know Dr. Brandon Brackenbury as a large animal veterinarian who has worked to keep their herds healthy throughout the past 22 years.

But Brackenbury is proudest of his accomplishments with the community’s youth, both as the current assistant football coach and defensive coordinator at Declo High School and as volunteer dairy superintendent of the Cassia County Fair and Rodeo from 2007-2019.

Motivated by the chance to work with youth in a new capacity, Brackenbury accepted a position in June as a University of Idaho Extension educator serving Cassia County. He’ll invest 35% of his time in financial management and farm succession, 35% in production animal work and 30% in UI Extension 4-H Youth Development.

Brackenbury, who earned a bachelor’s degree in animal, dairy and veterinary science from Utah State University and a doctorate in veterinary medicine from Purdue University, looks forward to drawing from his background as a veterinarian in delivering educational programming to area producers. And he’s especially eager to help 4-H youth gain confidence and develop skills that will serve them throughout their lives.

“To be honest, I wish it was 100% 4-H. I love kids,” Brackenbury said.

On the gridiron, he helped coach the Declo varsity football team to the state championship game last season. His successes at the county fairgrounds have been equally impressive.

When Brackenbury first started as dairy superintendent, dairy heifers for 4-H projects were in short supply. That year, just 11 kids showed dairy heifers. Most of those participants had family ties in the dairy industry, and few had purebred dairy animals. To grow the category, Brackenbury convinced about a half dozen local dairy operators to contribute a few calves each toward establishing a dairy pool.

“I really wanted to focus on those kids who wanted to do a 4-H project but didn’t have the ends to get an animal,” Brackenbury said. “I would just take all of the kids and draw their number out of a hat.”

Eventually, a large dairy joined in and significantly deepened the pool. The county’s dairy program grew to encompass about 100 youth at its peak, most of whom were showing animals from the pool. Local dairymen have also supported the program by attending 4-H sales and buying back dairy animals from youth.

Brackenbury implemented another important procedural change, when he switched to using slightly older December-born calves rather than February-born calves for dairy projects, thereby ensuring all of the animals had ample time to be weaned and vaccinated.

Seeking to teach youth speaking and job interviewing skills, he also established a requirement for 4-H or FFA youth enrolled in a dairy project to give a short presentation and answer questions about animal science.

Brackenbury advocates for making speeches mandatory for other animal project categories at the fair, and he plans to conduct a survey of every youth who has done a speech following a dairy presentation to compile supporting data. For one youth in particular — a soft-spoken boy named Levi Nelson — Brackenbury recalls the public speaking requirement was especially fruitful.

“The first year he came in as a shy, little kid reading from his notecards. I mean you could barely hear him,” Brackenbury said. “Two years later he came in with his suitcoat and tie and had his presentation memorized, and he was just speaking. As I watched him continue through 4-H until he aged out, he just walked with a different confidence.”

As a veterinarian, Brackenbury has emphasized training clients to recognize and address medical issues on their own, understanding the time it takes him to arrive at their dairies can mean the difference between an animal surviving or dying.

With youth, he also prioritizes self-sufficiency, as well as instilling a deep appreciation of the importance of agriculture.

“As we look at how our agriculture sector has changed and continues to change, we have a minute number of kids who are going to be directly involved in agriculture. They’re not going to all be farm owners, and they’re not all going to have a ranch, a dairy or a feedlot,” Brackenbury said. “What I want is to produce advocates for agriculture wherever they may end up. I want to give them as much knowledge as I can.”

Brackenbury was born in Albion, where he still resides. He and his wife, Carie, have four adult children — three daughters and a son — and are expecting their first grandchild in September.

Documenting Idaho’s Bees

University of Idaho Extension is working to build a program that will train volunteers to collect and identify bees, with the goal of establishing an atlas cataloging the rich diversity of bee species throughout the state.

Oregon State University Extension created the Master Melittologist Program in 2018, training citizen scientists to collect and curate specimens toward a broader goal of documenting the bees of the Pacific Northwest (PNW). UI Extension Educator Brad Stokes, of Canyon County, who specializes in horticulture and entomology, is collaborating with Andony Melathopoulos, an associate professor and pollinator health specialist with OSU Extension, to expand the program into the Gem State.

Stokes is pursuing funds to launch and sustain the program and has already begun building his base of volunteers.

Mellitology is the branch of entomology pertaining to the study of bees. Ten volunteers and four instructors — Stokes; Melathopoulos; Armando Falcon-Brindis, an entomology specialist at the U of I Parma Research and Extension Center; and Ron Bitner, an Idaho vintner and bee biologist who manages his vineyards for the benefit of pollinators — participated in an introductory training session hosted Sept. 12 at Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge in Nampa.

Largely overlooked in the past, native bees are gaining recognition for their role in maintaining healthy ecosystems and pollinating agricultural crops. Pomology experts, for example, believe the native blue orchard bee will be more crucial for pollinating orchards in the future than domesticated honeybees.

“We’re figuring out that these native bee species are almost certainly better pollinators than Apis mellifera — the European honeybee,” Stokes said. “Idaho has such a diversity of crops — especially here in the Caldwell area where we have 140 different crops and a lot of seed crops — and we have a diversity of native bees that have been undocumented to date. We don’t even know what we have, and that’s a really important scientific question because you can’t protect something if you don’t know what species you have.”

The Master Melittologist Program trains volunteers to become naturalists who explore the landscape and collect bees, photographing any plants they discover supporting bees and placing bees associated with a common plant into the same jar. Volunteers who reach the program’s apprentice level are able to collect bees, prepare museum-quality specimen mounts and capture data in a scientifically robust manner. Volunteers who pass rigorous testing to reach the journey level are qualified to identify bees to the genus level. Their work is verified by a taxonomist. In both Idaho and Oregon, the program’s registration fee is $300.

OSU’s program has already produced more than 200,000 samples of native bees tied to associated plants, which is one of the world’s largest datasets of its kind. The program has identified 600 individual bee species, including dozens that were previously undocumented in Oregon. Melathopoulos anticipates some of them will eventually prove to be previously unknown bee species and will be assigned names. OSU has also developed a tool that draws from the database of bee species, their associated plants and the locations where they were found to provide site-specific guidance for landscape revegetation efforts.

The Washington State Department of Agriculture launched its own bee survey in 2023, also using Master Melittologist volunteers. The Washington Bee Atlas has since grown rapidly.

In 2020, Bitner and the College of Idaho received an $87,000 Specialty Crop Block Grant, provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and awarded through the Idaho State Department of Agriculture, to evaluate native bees in Treasure Valley specialty crop farm fields, employing a former Idaho middle-school teacher, Amy Dolan, to assist in the project. OSU later hired Dolan to train a small group of Idaho volunteers to begin work on cataloging specimens for an Idaho Bee Atlas. Dolan has since left the state, and partnering with UI Extension will bolster Idaho’s contributions toward cataloging the bees of PNW.

“We’re just in the perfect geographical location to find all of these species, and probably some that are yet to be documented,” Stokes said. “They might be closely associated with very rare flowers or plants, so their impact on the ecosystem might be extraordinarily important.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has provided funding for the identification of bee species collected within National Wildlife Refuges in Idaho. Any bee specimens representing new species in Idaho counties or statewide will be added to the collection at the Orma J. Smith Museum of Natural History and the USDA Pollinating Insect Lab in Logan, Utah.

“The Great Basin has the highest bee diversity in the world, and Idaho sits at the crossroads of three major bee faunas,” Melathopoulos said. “All of the cool bees are in Idaho.”

For more information about the Idaho Master Melittologist Program, contact Stokes at bstokes@uidaho.edu or 208-459-6003. Visit https://extension.oregonstate.edu/master-melittologist to enroll directly.

Faculty Spotlight

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