By extension

New Mexico Business Journal, May, 2000 by Debbra O'Hara

New Mexico State University may be based in Las Cruces, but its influence can be felt in every corner of the state. You can thank Abe Lincoln.

As a land grant university, New Mexico State University in Las Cruces is singular among New Mexico's higher education institutions. Established by Congress, signed into existence in 1862 by President Abraham Lincoln, and later modified by law, land grant colleges were given three missions: residential teaching, cooperative extension service, and managing agriculture experimental stations. The point is to extend the university to its surrounding counties. By law, the extension service in particular is prohibited from teaching on campus.

At some land grant institutions, the extension function is served by all colleges, but at NMSU, the College of Agriculture and Home Economics serves as the land grant agent. "The college takes its mission very seriously--the education of the working class," Dean Jerry G. Schickedanz said. Dean since March, Schickedanz has served as interim dean for almost three years and was director of cooperative extension for five years.

Research on basic and applied agriculture--pest management, variety trials, disease control measures, water usage, and cultural practices, for example--is ongoing at off-campus science centers in 11 locations around the state. Resident agents become a part of their local community, Schickedanz said. In addition, NMSU has an extension office, staffed by resident NMSU faculty, in every county of New Mexico. Currently 35 regional office specialists in fields of home economics, livestock, etc., provide support to those local agents.

"Our clientele is every citizen of New Mexico. A lot of people think it is just farmers and ranchers, but we do a lot of work with urban clientele and retirees," Billy Dictson, interim associate director for extension, said. "Someone with a 50 by 50 foot lot in town with a disease on his rosebushes will get an answer the same as a farmer with corn disease on his crops.

"Our youth program with 75,000 4-H members is very visible at the fair, but people don't know about our inner city clubs and after school programs in Albuquerque where we are working with at-risk youth, teaching life skills classes. In the southwest part of state we're in welfare to work programs. We work with people from 6 years old to those in their retirement years. Our master gardener program has a lot of people who are retired and want to learn about gardening."

Multi-level funding for these programs is unique to New Mexico. "I don't know of anybody else who gets their funding from three sources," Dictson said, explaining that a third of each county's funding derives from its county commissioners, a third from the state legislature, administered through NMSU, and a third from the federal government, through the USDA, and grants and contracts from private foundations and government agencies. The result is an appropriation budget of $13 million a year and grants and contracts of approximately $8 million a year: $20 million total for all services.

"Our faculty, 85 percent of the total budget of the college, is funded through the experimental station and extension office," Dictson said. This faculty will soon be using state-of-the-art labs and teaching facilities in the new $24 million Center for Sustainable Development of Arid Lands (CSDAL), a more than 116,000 sq. ft. building scheduled for completion in June.

"I think it will become kind of a magnet for research of arid and semiarid environments," said Steve Loring, NMSU administrative analyst. "I have a feeling that within the next five years, people will look at this building and say this is where it's at."

"We will have the resources of labs and teaching facilities that will be of immense value to us," he said. The focus of research at the center will be sustainable, planned agricultural, urban, and tourism-related development that results in retaining, not depleting resources.

Arrangements allowing faculty members from different departments to share lab space at CSDAL, Loring believes, will foster more interdisciplinary cooperative research at NMSU and with institutions beyond NMSU. (Arid and semi-arid lands research is important, not only to New Mexico, but also to countries with which it shares cooperative research agreements, such as Palestine, Israel, and Australia.)

Excited about the future at NMSU, Loring said, "I'm looking for great things to happen here."