Various Perspectives
of Missouri

Missouri’s Eco-regions. A joint project including MU and MDC

Missouri’s Watershed Basins

Missouri as Viewed by the Dept of Economic Development

Missouri as served through University Outreach and Extension

Ever found yourself susceptible to being blind to the familiar? I have walked by wires sticking out of our wall at home for over a year now. It’s come to the point that I don’t even see the undone chore, while visitors walk around what could be dangerous. What is it about most of us that allows us to gradually learn to ignore the obvious? Driving through Missouri and thinking about the relationship between Missourians and their land-grant university, I often get similar notions. How could we heighten the value of Mizzou to the state? We in CAFNR are the teachers, researchers and extension educators to our two largest industries; tourism and agriculture. Are we too familiar, or not familiar enough?

I’ve heard many come to the conclusion that one of our dilemmas is the nature of the state itself. We are extremely diverse and heterogeneous. With geography as diverse as big rivers, Ozark hills, plains, and delta lowlands; political history of a state divided from its very inception; and a social intersection of east/west and north/south cultures …you could say we have an identity crisis.

We find ourselves repeatedly caught in rural/urban, big/small, union/independent debates that can’t be won. Yet, it is our state’s diversity that is the single best model of our nation’s diversity. And, in an increasingly global era, learning to cope and succeed within such heterogeneity must certainly have great value.

We have been quietly studying new vocabulary, new structures, and new ways for CAFNR to become more relevant to the state’s needs. Not that we aren’t successful now, but the world is rapidly changing around the land-grant university, colleges of agriculture, and our research and extension missions in particular. It would seem Missouri’s diverse environment could aid Mizzou, and CAFNR in particular, as we work toward a renewed position of state and national scholarly leadership. This won’t come without effort and being innovative with the new reality – an era of increasing importance of both the global and the local.

With no answers and only questions, CAFNR will soon initiate a new project to study the familiar in hopes of discovering new ways to serve Missouri. Armed with the work of past and current faculty among the plant, animal and social sciences, and with centers such as RUPRI, FAPRI and the Federal Reserve Bank’s Center for the Study of Rural America, we intend to focus on Missouri’s places and regions as an alternative organizing structure for needed research and outreach.

Despite what we know about power of place to distinguish a business, a product, a people ... we continue to ignore it as a vehicle to organize study within our College. A focus on "place" could help avoid the unobtainable win/win in rural/urban, big/small, and other debates that are increasingly irrelevant in a ‘glocalized’ world.

History has given the university disciplines and departments to help classify and categorize our studies. Science has given us the tools and ability to choose our scale of inquiry – from the sub-atomic to the celestial. Consider participating in development of place as a fundamental building block to organize both natural and social science scholarship in what could be the land-grant university’s best contribution in the years ahead.

With the richness and diversity of Missouri’s places as our proving grounds, harnessing the power of place could become one of CAFNR’s most noteworthy traits as we discover and develop the sciences of life.

Regards,
John Gardner