In his role as Jasper County’s Extension Director and Agriculture and Natural Resources Extension Educator, Bryan Overstreet sometimes has the opportunity to teach fourth graders about water – from water quality and water conservation to the complete water cycle. Through these lessons, he shares how climate change affects not only the water cycle, but also agriculture.
“The timing of the rains in our county is an issue. This year, we’ve had parts of our county that suffered from drought this summer but now farmers can’t harvest because it’s too wet,” Overstreet says.
Overstreet and other Extension educators are a part of the North Central Climate Collaborative (NC3), a group of Extension professionals across the region who are working to increase the adoption of climate- smart practices and provide bias- free climate information to Extension professionals, natural resource managers and communities.
Hans Schmitz, Posey County Agriculture and Natural Resources Extension Educator, serves on the NC3 team. Schmitz disseminates climate information to his colleagues and helps coordinate webinars.
Over 400 people from multiple nations, including 14 educators from Purdue Extension, attended a NC3 virtual conference in June 2021. Featured sessions included climate modeling, climate’s impact on communities and the intersection of climate, agriculture and water.
The keynote speaker for the conference also covered climate justice, acknowledging how climate change can have different impacts on underprivileged populations.
“NC3’s first set of webinars were created to make extension educators in the North Central region feel comfortable talking about climate change and agriculture,” Schmitz says. “Since then, we’ve adjusted the webinars and our current goal is to provide professionals with information and resources to create weather-ready farms in the region.”
Overstreet also looks for ways to share climate-smart practices with the wider community in Jasper County, from sharing newsletters, speaking on a local radio show, and through his work on the Purdue Extension Farm Stress team.
