A Look At Land Grant Impacts

STARKVILLE, Miss. — People around the world can learn what land-grant university researchers and Extension professionals have accomplished through a new online resource.

Mississippi State University and its partner institutions in the national Association of Public and Land-grant Universities launched a new website to highlight research and Extension impacts on March 2.

The online database allows users to view impact summaries by region, state, focus area, year and funding source. The website was designed to represent the nation’s Cooperative Extension Service and Agricultural Experiment Stations agencies, including the MSU Extension Service and the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station. It includes a history of the land-grant system and its threefold mission: teaching, research and outreach.

“The MSU Extension Service is proud to support this effort to provide statistical, evidence-based statements of the impact of Extension in Mississippi and in other states, all across the country,” said Gary Jackson, director of the MSU Extension Service. “For more than 100 years, the Extension Service has been making a difference in the lives of families, individuals, businesses and communities through educational outreach. This database is a step toward greater accountability for the public dollars that support our work, as well as a tool for measuring how far we’ve come and where we are going.”

Sonny Ramaswamy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said in a press release that the website provides information to a wide range of stakeholders.

“The Land-Grant Impacts website is a new tool that will better inform the American people and the international community of the significant agricultural research, education and extension impacts taking place at land-grant universities across our nation, which offer practical solutions to today’s critical societal challenges,” Ramaswamy said. “This website will help policy makers and the public learn more about this work that is partially supported with NIFA funding.”

The database is located at http://landgrantimpacts.tamu.edu.

MSU is one of 238 public research universities, land-grant institutions, state university systems and affiliated organizations represented by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. The land-grant university system has affiliates in all 50 states, the four U.S. territories, the District of Columbia, Mexico and Canada.