RE: Who is "the Public?" (or what are the needs of the agricultural community?)

[Rebekah Tanner <foxgull@netscape.net>]

What are the needs of the agricultural community?

In The Mohawk valley Libraray Association's project we have focused on one slim slice of the agricultural "pie" -- sustainable agriculture. We have been buying alot of "how-to" on farming practices, horticulture, animal husbandry, and in that attempting to presenting some alternatives to "typical" practices such as pasture-fed dairy cows, Integrated Pest Management (IPM), and more and more -- We have offered information on the development of business plans, the use of Internet by agriculturalists, legal information, tax information ... as one of our community partnering agencies is the New York Center for Agricultural Medicine & Health (a NIOSH Center -- National Institutes for Occupational Health & Safety) the entire area of safety, stress management, the new "North American Guidelines for Children's Agricultural Tasks" and other health issues has been a big push. We have bought some juvenile and young adult materials and attemped to reach the "next gneration" of farmers with quality information about sustainable agriculture and sustainable communities. And with one group in our target audience being the growing Amish community of Montgomery County, we have purchased information both useful to this group -- for example, on the use of horse power, etc. and about them -- to teach their new neighbors about their adapable & evolutionary life-style (in contrast to the media view of the Amish as "stuck in history). Because of its hightly controversial and politicized nature, we have avoided the use of the word "organic" in anything we produced, but we did not hesitate to purchase materials about organic farming and gardening.

We have spent, in two years, about $30,000 on books, videos, periodicals, CD-ROM products, maps, posters, games -- and we hope we have begun to provide needed information. 

What does the agricultural community need?

It was our experience that what the agricultural community most needed from their local public libraries was to know farmers and the farming community is welcomed and that our public libraries had something to offer them when they arrived!

Rebekah Tanner