A celebration of Tennessee Extension. It's history, the work happening today, and plans for the future. March is Extension Month in Tennessee. Hello, I'm Charles Denny.
This is AdCast, brought to you by the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture. March may be best known for college hoops, buzzer beaters, and blooming flowers, but the NCAA tournament and coming of spring aside, it's also Extension Month in Tennessee. Extension is the outreach arm of the University of Tennessee and Tennessee State University. Sort of the university act, and fill in the name of your hometown here.
Dr. Robert Burns is Dean of UT Extension, headquartered on the Knoxville Agriculture Campus. Yeah, so March was established as Extension Month in Tennessee in 2015 by the General Assembly, and it gives us a great way to kind of highlight the outreach, the educational programming, service, and economic impact that Extension programs have across the state of Tennessee. Extension has agents in all 95 Tennessee counties.
They work in agriculture, family and consumer sciences, and 4-H youth development. Yeah, really, if you think about how Extension works, we are part of the University of Tennessee system, and really the state is our classroom. Extension has a county office in all 95 counties of the state. We're very much a county-based program, so in those offices we maintain agricultural county agents, family and consumer science county agents, and 4-H youth development county agents.
Those agents deliver educational programs, science-based information, and they're backstopped by a cadre of faculty and specialists that are based here on campus at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, as well as at locations in Jackson and Nashville in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and some other locations. But those faculty are typically PhD-level faculty that are providing that science-based information curriculum and training to our county agents, so they're up to speed and ready to go to support the people in Tennessee. Agents meet with people one-on-one, including farm visits, cooking demonstrations, and after-school 4-H meetings. And Byrne says there's a dollar figure attached to their educational efforts.
Yeah, so UT Extension typically makes about 4 million direct contacts across the state each year. Our numbers vary by year, but typically return $8 to $9 for every dollar invested in UT Extension and have an economic impact that's nearly $500 million across the state. Extension is 108 years old. The organization has evolved to meet changing times, but its core mission remains the same, to provide unbiased research-based information.
But the organization's reach is measured in greater terms than just the spread of knowledge. Agents work and often live in these counties and are very much a part of their communities, connecting with people, where clients become neighbors and friends. We've held on to that county-based model in Tennessee, and I think it's served us well and will continue to do so, because what we really excel at are serving the needs of local communities. And the way we're able to do that is because we have staff in all 95 counties in the state.
And so those folks live and work in those counties, they understand the needs of those counties, they work with those folks on a daily basis in those counties. And our Extension program, really, our county agents are woven into the fabric of the community. So for Extension Month, Burns encourages folks to get to know Extension in your county. There may very well be an Extension Month event near you, like an open house, and it's a great way for us to get to know one another.
Some counties are holding special programming days where they invite the public in and provide a wide cross-section of the programming that's available. And we see a lot of new clientele that may not be aware of us that come in and may say, well, we didn't know that the Extension offered information on homebuyer assistance or offered information on financial planning or offered information on variety trials for your home garden or many other things. So we try to use that month to kind of showcase the broad spectrum of programs that we have and, again, get people into those county offices so they know where they are and understand the wide variety of service information we offer. Thanks for listening.
I'm Charles Denny. For more real-life solutions provided by the UT Institute of Agriculture, go to our website at ag.tennessee.edu.