Urbana, Illinois
January 3, 2008
A
University of Illinois Extension website focusing on
agricultural marketing, finance, management, law, policy, and
other issues is drawing about 250,000 page requests each month,
and a
special report on ethanol has generated significant
interest.
"The ethanol report alone was downloaded 33,000 to 35,000 times
in the first three weeks following its posting," said Robert
Hauser, head of the Department of Agricultural and Consumer
Economics which oversees the website.
"Corn-Based
Ethanol in Illinois and the United States" includes nine
chapters whose authors include members of the department and
other departments in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and
Environmental Sciences. Chapters range from ethanol economics at
the local level to the use of distillers dried grains in
livestock feed to ethanol policy and politics.
"The goal of the report is to provide objective information to
Illinois stakeholders, cutting through the emotion, political,
and economic self-interests that often dominate discussions
about ethanol production and use," explained Hauser, who wrote
the report's introduction and co-authored another chapter.
In existence for several years, the farmdoc (Farm Decision
Outreach Central) website has steadily gained in usage by
producers and others interested in the agriculture sector, said
Scott Irwin, a professor in the Department of Agricultural and
Consumer Economics who oversees the website.
"Typically, the site has in excess of 30,000 unique visitors
each month," he said. "We have an e-mail subscriber list of over
6,000 people."
A relatively new feature is a blog;
FarmGate, which
itself generated almost 90,000 page requests in November. The
new site uses weblog--"blog"--technology to integrate,
synthesize, and summarize information, much like a "digital
county agent, Irwin added.
"To date, over 500 posts on a wide array of topics have been
published at Farmgate," he said. "The posts feature material
from dozens of universities and USDA agencies. We find that
posts on our blog are re-published at several other high-volume
ag websites."
The farmdoc project, Irwin said, represents a new way of meeting
the outreach mission at the University of Illinois.
"The project website has become an extremely popular 'one-stop
source' of farm-level information for producers and others in
the agricultural industry across the United States and around
the world," he said. Extension field staff, commodity
organizations, and farm organizations also rely extensively on
the comprehensive and current information available at the site.
"The farmdoc project has received several state and national
awards for excellence." |
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