Agricultural and Applied Economics Department Wins Two Southern Association Agricultural Economics Awards

Farm Management Update, February 1997

Southern Association Agricultural Economics Extension Award presented to Virginia, Oklahoma, and Texas

The multi-state efforts to teach farmers and ranchers financial record keeping and analysis was recognized as the top Extension program at the SAEA meetings held February 3, 1997 in Birmingham, Alabama. Over 5,000 farmers and ranchers have received training in using Quicken for financial record keeping since 1993 in the three states. Evaluations from each state have all been overwhelmingly positive. Dr. Walter Armbruster, Director of the Farm Foundation and President-Elect of the American Agricultural Economics Association made the following comments about the multi-state program,

"...they (Va, TX, and Ok) decided to capitalize on a commercial product (Quicken) that had gained widespread acceptance to help solve the farm records problem. This approach saved significant public and private resources. Training farmers to maintain better records became the heart of the program rather than focusing on the computer."

He goes on to make the following comments about the mature of the multi-state program,

"...this program should be recognized as a prototype for future extension programs... they organized an informal network throughout the south to eliminate duplication and share their experiences. As a result, cooperative extension was able to provide training to hundreds of farmers and ranchers across the south with modest investments of public and private funds.... It utilizes scarce public resources and people where they are found to address a regional and national issues."

Southern Association Agricultural Economics Teaching Award presented to Mike Ellerbrock

Mike teaches our introductory courses in micro and macro. His students comment on how hard he pushes them. His outstanding student evaluations range from 3.8 - 4.0 and last Spring Mike received a unanimous 4.0 rating from a class of over 100 students. Mike has also developed a noted Summer Institute for K-12 teachers on "Teaching Environmental Economics." Participants write curricula on real world problems and Mike distributes the curricula free-of-charge to all 1,800 schools in the Commonwealth. Mike's philosophy of education derives from the original meaning of the word education (educare): to "draw out" students, not to merely put facts and figures and infomation in students' heads, with the ultimate goal of education being to draw out the wisdom which is inherent within students.

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