soil-conservation-people-religion-and-land.pdf - South West NRM

industries, the principle of lquser-paysw in commercial
agricuZ%%re has much to recommend it. Its application could
free+=-much-heeded state funds for the urgent and fundamental
task '3-CT soil conservation. It can be argued that rural
producers should fund those advisory services in the field of
commercial production, while government concentrates its
resources allocation on services concerned with the
maintenance of the national soil resource.
To gain a clear picture of the full extent of soil
consemation extension effort in all states, the contributions
of all organizations need to be pooled to gauge the total
effort, relative to production extention.
Extension Trainincr and Career Paths In a recent sunrey of
universities and colleges throughout Australia, the author
found that the promising progress made during the 1960s in
extension education has come to a halt, with professional
training being limited to the University of Queensland. When
this situation is 'compared to Robertson's (1987) survey
referred to above, it is. not surprising to find that all
states are appointing extension officers who have virtually no
formal education in the principles and methods of extension.
Added to this is the confounding effect of new appointees also
having a minimum amount of background on soil conservation per
- sea
Robertson's survey reflects a wide range of in-service
training of extension staff, mostly in the sphere of
communications. Given the lack of formal training and the low
number of soil conservation extension posts available, it is
understandable that extension is not regarded by many as a
well structured and respected career path for graduates to
follow.
The identity problem of the professional extension officer has
been described by the author (Roberts, 1986) as follows:
While many in research would point to the severe cuts in
funding which they have suffered in recent years, they do have
ty, a status, a well-established educational base, a
specialist societies which act as their spiritual
regular professional conferences well reported in
their3aSearch journals. Extension on the other hand has none
of these pillars of the profession. It has virtually no
recognized degree training programme (with one exception), no
society, no journal, no status, no identity, no nothing! In
practice, extension officers make do as well as they can.
They seek a technical home in the agricultural societies, a
sociological home in the social sciences, a methodological
home in the informatics and a career path in whatever is
available at the time. A recent bibliography of Australian
extension contributions (Chamala et al., 1985) reflects the
problems quite vividly.
In 1974, the Federal Government commenced providing
Commonwealth Extension Services Grant (CaEaSaGa) funds to the
states for the expansion of extension services. These funds
had a significant effect on the n er of extension staff in