For Mark Kepler, county Extension director in Fulton County,
international extension doesn’t just satisfy his own love of travel and
curiosity about other cultures. It’s also a way to share the world with his
fellow residents of the largely rural county who may not have the same
opportunities. “As a Purdue Extension employee, I’m expanding my knowledge all
the time,” he says. “This is a learning job, and I have learned a lot in 35
years. By traveling internationally, I further expanded my knowledge of what’s
going on in the world.” Kepler’s background is in hog nutrition. His travels
abroad focused on that topic as well as broader areas of agriculture, and he
recorded his observations, experiences and interactions in a journal. He shared
his findings and experiences in a series of newspaper articles and by speaking
at meetings of local organizations. “People here hadn’t had a chance to go to
those places, so they are open and receptive,” he says. His first trip abroad
in 2005 took Kepler to Russia through the international nonprofit agency
ACDI/VOCA. There he visited a hog operation in a small village southeast of
Moscow. “This was really an old communal farm, where villagers raised the hogs,
butchered them, and made and marketed the sausage, which was more like what
we’d call ‘baloney.’” Kepler worked with the farmers on nutritional
formulations. Bringing Ukrainian students to Indiana That experience whetted
Kepler’s appetite for another experience in Eastern Europe. In April 2007, he
was one of three Purdue Agriculture Extension Educators who traveled to Ukraine
on a Purdue-sponsored trip to work with Poltava Agrarian Academy. Over 11 days,
they presented information on various program areas of the Cooperative
Extension Service — small grain production, swine reproduction, forage
management, tourism, youth cultural exchange, community development and
biofuels — to students, faculty and local farmers. They also explored ways the
universities could work together in research, teaching and extension. Kepler
used his new connection to a Poltava administrator over the next two years to
bring four Ukranian graduate students to Fulton County for the summer. He
matched them with people in the community willing to house them and provide
relevant paid work — two crop farmers, a veterinarian and a farm equipment
dealer. At least one of those relationships is ongoing, he adds. Holistic
agriculture in Vietnam In 2018 Kepler joined Elizabeth Karcher, assistant
professor of animal sciences, three other Extension Educators and Purdue
students on a spring break trip to Vietnam. In addition to spending time with
Vietnamese students at an agricultural university in Hanoi, the group visited
farms and tourism sites. Kepler notes that the VAC system, Vietnam’s holistic
approach to agriculture, builds on thousands of years of sustainable farming
methods. (VAC in Vietnamese is vuon, ao, chuong, which means
garden/pond/livestock pen.) “They use it in rural villages, trying to utilize
all the different aspects of farming,” Kepler explains. At the first hog
operation he saw in Vietnam — most were small, with just three or four sows
penned behind a house — Kepler asked about an unfamiliar setup. The interpreter
answered, “Biogas.” The simple system involved moving manure from the hog pen
into an in-ground pit and running a pipe to a burner in the home, where the
homeowner could light the methane as fuel. “In the U.S., farmers put waste in
huge vats and trap the methane. We think of it as a big thing,” Kepler says.
“But this homeowner — she just lit that burner.” For Kepler, fostering
international extension doesn’t necessarily require a plane ticket. Closer to
home, he has brought international graduate students from Purdue to Fulton
County to stay with dairy, grain and crop farmers for a weekend. “I’d love to
see more Extension people going on these kinds of programs,” he says. “Purdue
University has a lot to offer the world.”