25/26 Yearbook

Draft

Welcome to the 2025-2026 Yearbook of the New Technologies for Ag Extension (NTAE) grant initiative!

Funded through a Cooperative Agreement with USDA NIFA, NTAE is currently administered in partnership with the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension and just completed its third year under a new award cycle.

NTAE is an innovation incubator that accelerates high-impact projects like “CyberPest Management for Farmers,” which helps farms protect themselves from cyberattacks, and “Food Recovery for the Future,” which has created a nationally scalable food waste prevention model based on a highly successful state-level project.

The program also is leading the way on AI for Cooperative Extension, continuing to develop the ExtensionBot chatbot, which logged over 1.3 million visits during the grant year, and providing guidance for Extension educators to optimize their online content for AI search tools.

And for the second year, NTAE has provided critical management infrastructure, funding, and strategic support to ECOP-managed Program Action Teams, which are finding innovative ways to address high-priority societal issues—from the effects of extreme weather on communities to chronic disease and food insecurity to lack of essential digital skills.

We highlight the latest work of these PATs and their working groups in this yearbook, celebrating the impact they’re having today and the potential they have to make even greater differences tomorrow.

Thank you to everyone whose efforts made this yearbook possible and to USDA NIFA for its continued support of Extension’s innovative work.

Thank You

Thank you to everyone whose efforts made this yearbook possible and to USDA NIFA for its continued support of Extension’s innovative work.

Ashley Griffin, MS
Chief Operating Officer, Extension Foundation NTAE Project Director

Tira Adelman, MPA
Assistant Director Grants & Programs, Extension Foundation NTAE Project Manager

Extension professionals turn to EXF for hard and soft skill development

Extension Foundation (EXF) supports the Cooperative Extension System (CES) by equipping Extension professionals with the skills, tools, and resources they need to make a meaningful impact on their communities. We do this through customized professional learning experiences, including keynote presentations, workshops, webinars, and one-on-one coaching.

The support of the New Technologies for Ag Extension grant is key to our ability to deliver development opportunities, and during the 2025-2026 NTAE grant year, our education and outreach team was able to reach more #### participants with sessions covering a wide range of topics:

developing and maintaining healthy teams
building high-performing teams
developing leadership skills
using artificial intelligence for fundraising, grant writing, and marketing

By the Numbers

20 Webinars
1,500+ registrants across all topics
544 participants across land-grant universities
100+ one-on-one coaching sessions
250 views of webinar recordings
Across 130 participant responses collected throughout the series, 95.5% agreed or strongly agreed that the workshops provided valuable information for their Extension work.

Reviews from webinar and conference attendees and coaching clients were very strong:

“Your teamwork presentation was incredibly informative and engaging. Thanks for sharing it with our broader team.”
—Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County

“Thank YOU! for joining us last week. I really enjoyed our one-on-one time and found your keynote presentation to be quite informative and motivational.”
—Extension dean/director

“I was able to apply today something we learned about last week. It helped me empathize better with a couple of my colleagues. Thank you for putting words to something I could feel. I can’t wait for next week.”
—Coaching client

Not surprising given the rapidly increasing use of AI across all sectors, our AI webinars resonated particularly well:

Across 130 participant responses collected throughout the series, 95.5% agreed or strongly agreed that the workshops provided valuable information for their Extension work. The strongest signals emerging from the data indicate growing demand for AI-supported workforce development, practical implementation resources, and Extension-specific examples that translate emerging technologies into measurable community impact.

Impact Collaborative

As always, our Impact Collaborative initiative continued to unite Extension professionals, partners, and stakeholders to encourage innovation, collaboration, and a shared commitment to impact, driving change and amplifying the positive influence of Extension. New and long-standing Impact Collaborative facilitators met throughout the grant year to practice the Impact Collaborative workbook process, including the “Reflection” and “Ideation” blocks from the Impact Collaborative Workbook. These deep dives were led by trained facilitators as a peer-learning experience to enhance their understanding and facilitation techniques.

This collaborative infrastructure allowed the Sustainable Urban Food Systems PAT to successfully gather 37 national experts in Huntsville, AL, to create strategic action plans targeting urban agriculture and food waste. Similarly, the Resilient Lands and Communities PAT hosted a series of virtual convenings—drawing over 150 registrants for its first session—and successfully developed a whitepaper on resilience along with a Custom GPT tool to help Extension professionals communicate their impact on weather-related resilience. NTAE also supported the National Digital Extension Education Team in planning a Denver convening focused on broadband access and digital skills.

Extension Foundation leads the way on AI

If you want to know what glue is best for fixing a broken ceramic plate, ask Gemini, Claude, Siri, or one of the many other AI bots at your fingertips.

If you want to know what fertilizer is best for your lawn or whether you should use a particular pest management chemical on your crops, ask ExtensionBot.

An AI-powered information tool developed by the Extension Foundation specifically for Cooperative Extension, ExtensionBot will give you an answer pulled directly from trusted, research-based information from Extension publications and Land-grant university resources. Not only that, it will give you an answer that’s relevant to agricultural conditions in your state because it reads your IP address before it responds.

AI Powered by NTAE

Made possible by financial support from New Technologies for Ag Extension (NTAE), ExtensionBot is a primary example of the innovative work the Foundation is doing to ensure that Extension professionals and the communities they serve are equipped with the tools they need to thrive.

During the 2025-2026 NTAE grant year, the chatbot and MERLiN—the system that aggregates and continually updates the data the chatbot pulls from—improved their performance, expanded their reach into the universe of Extension expertise and knowledge, and logged more conversations. The Foundation has prioritized this focus on AI not only to help the general public find reliable answers more quickly but to make sure that Extension organizations can make even better use of the knowledge they already produce.

Working With the System

The Foundation is not doing this work on its own. It is collaborating extensively with a growing number of Extension directors and administrators as well as the Extension workforce.

Through workshops, convenings, and general discussions, the Foundation and its partners are identifying the strategies, policies, tools, and infrastructure the Cooperative Extension system needs to remain a trusted resource in a rapidly changing AI-driven environment. To take a deeper dive into the insights the Foundation has gleaned from this collaboration, read the 2026 National AI Report.

ExtensionBot is currently the top-performing chatbot for horticulture questions, outperforming all other AI models.

Growth

Short intro here about the growth in the numbers below, once I get the current year’s numbers.

	2024/2025	2025/2026
CONVERSATIONS	28,287	#
RESPONSES	53,557	#
EXTENSION RESOURCES CITED	55,142	#
INSTITUTIONS’ DATA INCLUDED IN MERLIN	30+	#

National Digital Extension Education Team closes tech access gap

Our economy increasingly operates on the assumption that everyone has the digital skills and access to high-speed internet that have become almost mandatory for living our lives. Generally, we need to have convenient, reliable, robust web access and be tech-savvy enough to search and apply for jobs, access training and education, and participate in other essential activities.

But plenty of Americans—particularly those in low income brackets and those in rural areas without broadband—lack sufficient tech skills or high-speed web access or both.

Equipping Cooperative Extension to help close this digital skills and broadband access gap is why the National Digital Extension Education Team (NDEET) exists, and with NTAE grant support it has made significant progress.

During the 2024-2025 NTAE grant year, NDEET studied how best to address broadband and digital skills needs and set goals around three priority areas it believes will have the biggest chance of leveling the technology playing field:

AI and emerging technology
cybersecurity
economic development

In this second NTAE grant year, the team deepened its understanding of what it can do to have the most impact in each of these areas. Here are some highlights:

AI and Emerging Technology

AI is rapidly, fundamentally changing our relationship with technology, and there’s no way for every Extension educator to keep up with all these changes on their own. Fortunately, there are plenty of AI experts throughout Cooperative Extension. (See related story on Extension Foundation’s leadership in the AI sphere.)

During this grant year, NDEET’s AI working group began building a directory of these experts and existing AI educational material. Eventually, this directory will be accessible to all Extension educators, allowing them to tap into the system’s rich expertise or offer their own expertise to other educators.

Ultimately, this will allow Cooperative Extension to be a trusted, human-powered AI resource for their communities.

Cybersecurity

The cybersecurity awareness training developed by NDEET was as eye-opening for the PAT as it was for the Ag Agents who delivered it this grant year.

Farmers in at least one session reported that cyberthreats don’t always come from foreign actors—they can come from other farmers. One producer shared that a competing farm had hacked into his mobile feeding app and changed the amount of feed dispensed to his cattle, making them sick. In other sessions, educators learned that many farmers are even more reliant on certain technology, like GPS-led tractors, than they thought, meaning they are quite vulnerable to GPS hijacks.

These insights will inform how NDEET revises the awareness workshop and how it develops future training.

Read more about the PAT’s project specifically to help farmers fight cyberthreats.

Economic Development

NDEET’s economic development working group contracted with a professor at the University of Missouri who will help create a guide that will allow Extension educators to extract and analyze national labor data from federal agencies.

There are third-party vendors that extract and analyze this data, but subscriptions to their content are often prohibitively expensive. The impact of having this analytics guide is that educators will be able to access and analyze freely available labor data and skill forecasts. This will help them determine what digital skills people in their communities need to get jobs in major industries in those communities and develop relevant workforce-oriented digital training guides.

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Climate-response PAT builds on strength of existing resiliency programming

So many areas of the country—even those historically not prone to extreme weather—are facing relentless floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters these days. As these events become more frequent and intense, it is critical for communities to have strategies not just for surviving them but for bouncing back after them.

The Resilient Lands and Communities Program Action Team spent this second NTAE grant year strengthening Cooperative Extension’s ability to support communities as they create and refine these strategies.

Perhaps the most significant outcome of this PAT’s recent work, according to team members, was the realization that they did not need to reinvent the resilience planning wheel. There is robust resilience work happening across Extension and within the communities it serves. It’s just not always labeled as such.

These communities don’t always need a new program or process, they just need help connecting the resources, expertise, relationships, and organizations they already have.

The toolkits, guides, and other resources the Resilient Lands PAT created this year are in many ways centralized repositories of existing climate-response programs and best practices—now available under a common umbrella to communities across the country.

By the end of the grant year, the working groups had finalized or were close to finalizing the following:

an 11-module, structured, adaptable guide to help community leaders, local governments, nonprofits, residents, and Extension professionals collaborate on community-centered resilience planning
a national resilience curriculum for Extension professionals that includes, among other things, a glossary of resilience terms to encourage the system to use a common language and an interactive map of climate programming throughout Extension
a three-part toolkit to help Extension and community members communicate effectively with local and state policymakers on policies related to resiliency efforts

In addition to realizing that they didn’t have to start from scratch to build these resources, the Resilient Lands PAT members experienced a shift in their understanding of resilience: They came to see it as more than preparedness, education, and individual or community actions. It is a much broader systems issue involving policies, infrastructure, natural resources, community networks, economic conditions, and the ability of people and institutions to work together.

Resilient Communities & Lands Program Action Team

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Convening strengthens connections, vision for Extension’s national role in workforce development

During the 2025-2026 NTAE grant year, for possibly the first time in Cooperative Extension history, Extension professionals who focus on workforce development participated in a formal planning process to determine how the system can be a national leader in that space.

Organized by the Economic and Workforce Development Program Action Team, the three-day convening drew representatives from 16 Land-grant universities as well as participants from nonprofits and industry. PAT leaders say the event allowed high-level workforce development specialists to make stronger connections with each other and begin to develop a shared vision of themselves as key players in economic development initiatives.

Participants also identified three tangible next steps they believe will keep the momentum of the convening going:

creating an educational program series that better prepares Extension staff to engage in workforce development activities;
writing a white paper that emphasizes Extension’s role’s relating to workforce development; and
hosting a second, larger convening that will bring together even more workforce development experts from around the system to share information and best practices.

Just as it has always been a critical resource for the agriculture sector and has become one for such areas as public health and technology, Extension is also well-positioned to be a significant resource for building resilient, sustainable economies.

Extension is well-positioned to be a significant resource for building resilient, sustainable economies.

Food loss prevention and urban gardening team make big impacts

The vision: A future where urban communities are equipped and empowered to reduce food loss and waster, create thriving sustainable food systems, and produce urban-grown food that reaches more consumers.

The progress: During the 2025-2026 NTAE grant year, the Sustainable Urban Food Systems Program Action Team’s working groups have

created a food loss and waste prevention pilot program, based on a successful Rhode Island model, that other states can use that has the potential to
- divert millions pounds of food from landfills and
- donate hundreds of thousands of pounds of surplus food, providing hundreds of thousands of meals to community members;
built an active network of 35 community gardens in West Philadelphia, exceeding the goal of 30—with one of those gardens harvesting 40 pounds of produce in just its first two harvests.

Read more about the food loss prevention pilot here.

link to come

These are just a few of the results of this PAT’s work in the last year, as it moved closer to its ultimate goals of reducing food loss and waste by 50% by 2030 and expanding urban food production.

The PAT working group in charge of the West Philly project also

distributed seedlings to each grower to increase production capacity;
provided tools to document the weight of produce harvests and the number of community members receiving that produce; and
created opportunities for collaboration, peer learning, and coordinated planning across neighborhoods.

Evaluation was a big priority for Sustainable Urban Food Systems PAT this year, as well—with both working groups creating surveys to gather data on their programs’ effectiveness, with guidance from the Extension Foundation’s evaluation specialist.

While Extension is often associated primarily with rural communities, this team is demonstrating the system’s deep commitment to its urban neighborhoods.

Health & Well-Being committee proposes national Extension health strategy

Improving individual and community health and well-being by improving access to preventive health services, healthy foods, and other health resources are chief among the driving forces behind Cooperative Extension’s Health and Well-Being Program Leadership Committee.

During the 2025-2026 NTAE grant year, this committee built on its work from the previous grant year, developing and proposing a national health strategy for Extension. It details this strategy in three primary documents:

2026 Health Tiger Team Report 2026: Provides guiding principles for national Extension health programming, identifies partnership opportunities with federal agencies, highlights policy opportunities Extension is positioned to advance, and outlines models that have the potential to inform and inspire future health programming
2026 National Framework for Health and Well-Being: Provides shared definitions, coordinated strategies, and actionable recommendations for how Land-grant universities can address social drivers of health in their communities
APLU Health Pillar Document: Provides a public-facing case for investment in food, agriculture, and health developed by Extension, agInnovation, and Academic Programs

With these documents and in other publications, the Health & Well-Being Program Leadership committee has also documented Extension’s alignment with and ability to support federal approaches to building and sustaining healthy communities—particularly among populations that are at increased risk for

chronic disease,
mental illness,
substance use disorders,
food and nutrition insecurity,
health problems that come with aging, and
the complications that come from lack of access to health care, education, and employment.

The work this committee has done will strengthen Extension’s position and raise its profile not only as a national public health leader but as the ideal partner to translate federal goals into sustainable, community-level outcomes.

In _____, the Health and Well-Being Program Action Team (PAT) graduated to a Program Leadership Committee because of its capacity to provide sustainable, system-wide leadership to Extension’s health and well-being programming. PATs develop a plan of work and apply for funding to implement that plan. With the option of having a paid leader or manager, PLCs can ______

Two high-impact projects receive financial support and Extension Foundation guidance

Program Action Teams had the opportunity during the 2025-2026 NTAE grant year to apply for funds to further develop or implement programs identified in their strategic plans. In January 2026, six projects were awarded targeted funding and support from Extension Foundation experts, including these two:

Food Recovery for the Future, a project of the Sustainable Urban Food Systems PAT
Cyber Pest Management for Farmers, a project of the National Digital Extension Education Team

Food Recovery for the Future

“Food Recovery for the Future” (FRF) is a national, consumer-education training program founded at the University of Rhode Island Cooperative Extension. Designed to address consumer food waste, the FRF community-led model integrates wasted food solutions, composting, food preservation, volunteerism, and behavior-change education.

The project’s goal during the grant period was to lay the foundation for national expansion of the model, which has been operating in Rhode Island for five years and has had a significant impact:

diverted more than half a million pounds of wasted food from the landfill
donated 400,000 pounds of surplus food to more than 300,000 community members
prevented 1,377 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions and saved 119 million gallons of water

With NTAE funding and Extension Foundation support, the project team created a pilot program—which included developing an online training course, an instructor’s guide and resource repository, and a program evaluation tool—based on the Rhode Island model that any Extension team in the country could adapt for its own community. More than 80 food system professionals across 30 states and Washington, D.C., expressed interest in adopting the FRF model—with Maine, Illinois, and Washington state being the most likely pilot sites over the next year.

Food Recovery for the Future will foster grassroots engagement, minimize food waste, and increase food access while providing evaluation data to inform broader food system strategies, positioning Cooperative Extension as a national leader in food system sustainability and climate impact mitigation.

CyberPest Management for Farmers

“CyberPest Management for Farmers” is an initiative to help farmers, Extension professionals, and other agricultural partners improve basic cyber hygiene and reduce vulnerabilities associated with digital agriculture technologies.

During this grant year, the project’s goals were to develop and pilot a set of foundational, farm-focused cybersecurity awareness and training resources, test those resources with farmers and Extension educators, and establish the initial framework for a scalable, statewide, and national cybersecurity education effort.

With NTAE support, the team was able to achieve those goals and build an online hub to house the resources, which provide guidance for protecting connected farm equipment, financial accounts, business records, and other digital systems that have become essential to modern agriculture.

The hub includes the following resources:

a quick guide to help farmers create strong passwords, update ag-related software, protect themselves from scams and phishing, and use multifactor authentication to protect online accounts
short but powerful stories about cyberpest attacks that have affected real farms and agricultural businesses
a tip sheet for what do and who to call if a cyberattack does happen
a tool for taking a thorough inventory of a farm hardware

The potential impact of this project is significant: Farm-related cyber incidents are far more than technology problems. They can disrupt everything from irrigation to feeding to equipment access. Attacks can also shut farmers out of their production records, reveal sensitive information, and steal money.

The CyberPest Management team’s work gives farmers the awareness and tools they need to reduce their risk in the face of an unfortunately growing threat.

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The Extension Foundation is a nonprofit established in 2006 by Extension Directors and Administrators nationwide. Extension Foundation is embedded in the U.S. Cooperative Extension System and serves on Extension Committee on Organization and Policy (ECOP).

This website is supported in part by New Technologies for Ag Extension (funding opportunity no. USDA-NIFA-OP-010186), grant no. 2023-41595-41325 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the Extension Foundation.

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