The nation’s top Excellence in Extension teacher, Rob Kallenbach, hated high school.
Kallenbach was happier selling alfalfa hay in the hills of southwestern Missouri near Bolivar than he was in the classroom. FFA and agriculture classes were his salvation. He loved hay and machinery.
“As soon as high school was over, that was enough for me,” he says. He wanted to farm.
His dad had other plans. The longtime clerk of Polk County wanted his oldest son to go to college. Try it for just one year, he told him. “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to go back.”
“I didn’t do well or like it much,” Kallenbach remembers. But his dad talked him into trying it one more year. Still, every weekend he drove home to deliver hay to farmers.
Halfway to his bachelor’s degree, he found science and statistics intriguing, as they related to hay.
The boy who hated school went on to earn his master’s degree in agronomy at the University of Missouri and his doctorate at Texas Tech University.
Kallenbach received the Excellence in Extension Award at the November 2014 meeting of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities in Orlando, Fla. The award, from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the Cooperative Extension System, goes to an Extension professional showing visionary leadership and programming impact, according to a news release from the University of Missouri.
He liked taking science to farmers in his first Extension role, working with forage producers in California deserts in the 1990s. He found that if he could reach and teach one farmer, that farmer would in turn teach another. A neighbor’s valued opinion remains key to changing practices and operations in rural communities. This is especially true in Amish and Mennonite communities, where he introduces 21st-century, research-based practices to farmers accustomed to 19th-century techniques.
Reviewed 2015-01-29