Ag agents complete new training course

Staff writer

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Two county agricultural agents from Portales and Clovis recently completed a new professional training course for extension specialists.

Luther Dunlap of Curry County and Ryan Craig of Roosevelt County earned the New Mexico Certified Extension Professional designation by completing a program called New Mexico Education Designed to Generate Excellence in the Public Sector, or NM EDGE.

According to a press release by New Mexico State University, which controls the various county extension offices in the state, completion of NM EDGE requires that participants take 24 three-hour classes. Six of the classes are specific to extension service, the article said, while the other 18 are from NM EDGE’s certified public manager curriculum. The purpose of the program, according to the article, is to “help New Mexico State University’s new Cooperative Extension Service specialists and agents to learn the organizational ropes of their new jobs.”

The process of earning the certification, Craig said, was strenuous and required him to travel to Santa Fe and Albuquerque to take the classes. The designation took him two years to earn because of the amount of classes and the required travel.

“You actually had to sit in there and do a pretest and a post-test. Truthfully, out of those 24 classes, we had about 96 hours of actual professional development training,” he said.

That amount of work, however intense, was worth the experience earned, according to Craig.

“We went through a lot of professional development that would have taken us years to acquire. There’s lots of that stuff as a young new employee and a recent graduate that I have never experienced prior to having these classes,” Craig said. “Not ever having a professional job like this, I didn’t know exactly where I stood. With these classes, they actually give me opportunities to see others and how others handled things in past experiences.”

For Dunlap, learning how the New Mexico extension service works was his primary reason for participating in the program.

“A lot of the instruction is specific to the New Mexico Cooperative Extension Service, so I guess the biggest reason for taking it was to learn how the university system works and also to get to meet in fellowship with other county extension agents,” said Dunlap. “Many of our specialists are located on the campus of New Mexico State University, so it gave us an opportunity to get to know one another, to spend time together.”