19 Pages, Agriculturalists and environmentalists must navigate complex challenges as the global population continues to increase and environmental resources are depleted. Colleges of agricultural and environmental sciences are tasked with addressing the nexus between environmental and agricultural challenges through research, education, and communication. However, the amount of research being conducted with both agriculture and the environment considered is largely unknown and, as a result, their corresponding communication messages may not provide coherent messages from the college. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to identify if research within a college of agricultural and environmental sciences takes a holistic approach so that communication efforts coming from the college can encompass both perspectives. The data were collected from a web-based system containing university research publications and analyzed using a thematic analysis and meta-synthesis. The meta-synthesis revealed 212 codes overlapping agricultural and environmental themes compared to the total 4,325 codes found across all publications. The findings indicated there was a limited amount of collaboration occurring between environmental and agricultural researchers within the college. Without collaborative research, agricultural communicators cannot develop science communication efforts that holistically integrate evidence-based science. As new challenges emerge at the nexus of agriculture and the environment, researchers must shift toward a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to ensure the science communication efforts sharing their findings are inclusive.
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 202 Document Number: D12020
Notes:
Obituary online from the Ames Tribune via legacy.com. 4 pages., Described the career and life of this 31-year communications faculty member at Iowa State University.
International: Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 30 Document Number: D10564
Notes:
2 pages., via website, The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy., Regulation gets a bad name in much of the world today. Business lobbies have successfully equated it in many people’s minds with just so much “red tape”. Government-imposed rules on how things are made, how services are delivered and what products have no place on the market at all are said to hamper business competitiveness. Precautionary measures aimed at safeguarding people’s health, or the health of fragile water bodies and ecosystems, are labelled unfair barriers to trade and investment — a claim made increasingly over the past quarter-century of corporate globalization.
International: Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 30 Document Number: D10565
Notes:
4 pages., via website, The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy., As Congress and the public debate the pros and cons of the United States-Mexico-Canada
Agreement (USMCA), or New NAFTA, behind the scenes and in the shadows transnational
corporations are doubling down on their plans to weaken and eliminate public protections
through a related entity, the secretive Regulatory Cooperation Council (RCC). This littleknown council has the mission of promoting trade by “reducing, eliminating or preventing
unnecessary regulatory differences” between Canada and the United States. Since the RCC’s
inception, agribusiness—including factory-farmed livestock producers, the feed industry, and
chemical and pesticide manufacturers and linked transportation businesses—has had a seat at
the regulatory cooperation table. Their focus, without exception, has been advocating the
scaling back and even elimination of important safety protections in both countries. In the U.S.,
recommendations made by the RCC feed directly into regulations enacted (or eliminated) by
the Department of Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection
Agency, among others
19 pages., via online journal., There are about 500 million small-scale farms in low-income countries on the planet. Farmers have been slow to adopt a threefold set of sustainable agronomic practices known as “conservation agriculture” (CA) that have been shown to double productivity. Our study of a novel CA project in Nicaragua, organized based on principles that counter convention, may point to improved ways of understanding and managing sustainable innovations in low-income countries. In particular, by connecting core ideas from the innovation literature to the literature that explores the role of intermediaries such as NGOs, our case study suggests that the efficacy of NGOs to facilitate the adoption of sustainable innovations by small-scale farmers in these settings may be enhanced if NGOs employ non-centrist approaches in order to address the critical uncertainties associated with such innovations. We discuss how our findings contradict some of long-standing arguments in the literature, and their implications for theory and practice.
