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A lot has changed in extension
work since Elvin Kulp became a county agent forty-one years ago, but there has been at least one constant influencing farmers' lives as well as their fortunes.
Gary Sieg, who farms 5,400 acres of dryland near the tiny northern Grant County community of Wilson Creek, provides a case in point. Sieg first met Kulp as a youth, when he enrolled in 4-H and had a cattle project.
Last spring as Kulp's retirement loomed, Sieg and Kulp sat in Sieg's farm shop, discussing their many years' relationship. "I'm on the weed board because of this guy right here," Sieg said, motioning towards Kulp.
Sieg attended a weed board meeting to complain about Canada thistle control.
About a year later, Kulp asked Sieg to accept an appointment on the Grant County Noxious Weed Control Board. (State law makes the county agent an advisor to the local weed control boards.)
"Basically," Sieg continued, "he said if you can talk the talk, can you walk the walk?" Sieg served eight years on the board. "I was pretty green. I got educated," he reminisced.
Kulp graduated from Pullman High School, obtained bachelor's and master's degrees in agronomy at WSU.
Kulp accepted a job as a county extension agent in Grant County in 1961 because Columbia Basin irrigation development there was less than 10 years old and he thought the work would be interesting. He retired this year after 41 years of work out of the same office.
Keeping up with constantly changing agricultural science, technology
and practice is a challenge for county faculty, and that has been
especially true for agents in the Columbia Basin as it transitioned
from rangeland and dryland crops to irrigation.
Kulp says the biggest change in agriculture that occurred during
his "watch" was the irrigation revolution that transformed
a desert into some of the nation's most productive cropland. A series
of new technologies required Kulp and farmers to constantly reeducate
themselves.
Another big change has been development of farm related businesses and industries in the Columbia Basin. Many local businesses were created to sell fertilizer and the equipment to apply it. Now momentum has shifted in the other direction.
It's not that farmers are fertilizing less, but that large companies have taken over. Part of the change has been a strong shift away from self-application to paying commercial applicators to apply the product.
A third revolution in Basin agriculture has been the dramatic development of much larger equipment, from tractors to combines and everything in between.
As Kulp sauntered off into retirement, the Basin was on the threshold
of another, perhaps quantum, leap in technology. "We're just
across the threshold of precision agriculture," Kulp says.
Computer and satellite technologies now make it possible for farmers to pinpoint their location in a field from a distance of up to six miles from a Geographic Information Systems tower. At 12 miles distance, they can come "well within a foot," Kulp says.
"Farmers are putting up stations. Farmers are moving that direction. It's going to be an asset, especially to farmers growing potatoes, corn and beans." | |
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| Elvin
Kulp, left, and Gary Sieg discuss farming issues on Sieg's Wilson
Creek area farm in northern Grant County |
Kulp also has seen an almost constantly changing mix of crops. The
heyday for beans and red clover seed as a cash crop is over. The state's
potato industry has undergone a dramatic market shift from nearly
100 percent of sales going into fresh markets for consumers and restaurants.
"We've had a real revolution in potatoes," Kulp says, with
the industry now heavily into processed potatoes—French fries
and dehydrated products.
Onions are providing a new growth area for Columbia Basin farmers "Washington wasn't even a player in the national market," Kulp says, "but now we're something like the third most important state in onion production." Both require storage facilities, but have very different management needs.
Grant County is the nation's leading sweet corn producer with a growing processing industry. "There was little if any processing in the early '60s," Kulp said.
As Kulp eased into retirement, Sudan grass and mustard were being introduced by Basin farmers to be plowed under in the fall to fumigate fields without chemical applications.
All of these and many other changes in farming keep extension's county faculty busy adjusting, adapting and initiating new practices. At the same time, extension has had to cope with repeated budget cuts.
"They have forced us to downsize and downsize and downsize,"
Kulp explains.
One result has been fewer state specialists to turn to. "You just have to go other routes, to other states' specialists, or to other individuals who are competent, and extrapolate the materials you need."
Problems notwithstanding, Kulp retired with pleasant memories. "I probably never could have found a vocation that fits my temperament and my life better than extension work," Kulp says.
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