By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
Programs on youth development, forestry and mariculture in Southeast are high priorities for Jodie Anderson, director of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Extension. On a visit to Sitka last week, Anderson highlighted the importance of bringing up young people through programs such as 4-H, one of many programs involved with the university’s extension service.
“Positive youth development, that would be 4-H,” Anderson told the Sentinel Friday. “That’s incredibly powerful… Not only do we not do an excellent job of bringing in youth and that kind of pipeline of understanding what extension is all about. I think it’s a great opportunity for the youth to connect and find success in different types of programming.”
Through Jasmine Shaw, who heads the UAF Cooperative Extension service in town, Anderson said the university maintains its connections to Sitka.
“Cooperative Extension is that outreach component that educates and teaches our community folks, our stakeholders – which are all the folks in Alaska – and uses research-based knowledge to improve their lives. And that’s really what we’re all about,” Anderson said.
She underscored the importance of the technical skill sets young people learn, particularly as related to forestry in Southeast. She spoke of the links between UAF and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the parent agency of the U.S. Forest Service.
The UAF program provides “opportunities in workforce development support, and funding for forestry and USDA job experiences, internships for working and also scholarship opportunities for training and building that kind of USDA worker pipeline, and really in the state the USDA is so present because of forestry in Southeast,” Anderson said.
Anderson was present for last week’s “Sustainable Southeast Partnership” meeting in Sitka, and listened to many people from around the region speak on the topic of forest management.
“What I heard was a real need for collaboration, and listening and understanding of all the different perspectives, because the forest is the location, it’s that natural resource that overlaps all of the communities in Southeast, and all of the agencies in Southeast,” she said. “And so federal, state, nonprofit, tribal, all of those different groups have to work together on this. And I think what we heard yesterday was a lot of conversation about that co-management.”
The institute’s programs span a wide range of subjects of everyday interest, from petroleum and mining to farming and 4-H. More information is published at https://www.uaf.edu/ianre/.
While forestry has long been a part of the economy of Southeast – from pre-war beach logging to industrial clearcutting followed by a shift to smaller scale operations – attention is now being drawn to commercial mariculture, Anderson said.
She said “we have zero expertise” in mariculture at present, but her institute is “actually looking at what it might look like to have a mariculture agent in Southeast who would be working directly with Sea Grant (a NOAA funding program), but would also be working to connect research and outreach to the communities.”
Invasive plants such as Japanese knotweed are also on IANRE’s radar. The university has its own pest management experts within the Cooperative Extension Service, she said.
When Anderson and IANRE communications manager Jenn Wagaman were in town Friday, they carried with them a couple of oversized fake animals, a foam rabbit and a squirrel, that would be archery targets for an upcoming 4-H class.
“We need to walk around with giant rabbits and squirrels at the conference today,” Anderson said with a smile. The archery class was held north of town later that day.
Sitka has a history of extension and research that dates from territorial days.
In the 19th century, Sitka was the site of the first experimental agriculture station in Alaska, Anderson said. The site is currently the U.S. Geological Survey station immediately north of downtown.
“Sitka’s ag station was in the late 1800s and it was predominantly fruit, predominantly apples. Lots of apple breeding, trying to find the right root stock to graft on that handles winter… Washington D.C. sent up men to see if ag was an option in Alaska,” she said.
The results of Sitka’s station led to experiments raising farm crops in Southcentral Alaska beginning in 1917, which eventually led to the establishment of a New Deal era agricultural colony at Palmer.
