By Matthew Burkhart
NC State faculty visiting Moldova say the country is on the verge of a major change in its agricultural sector, and they hope a new pilot program in three municipalities will help show what a full extension system could do.
In October, a small team from NC State’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) spent just over a week crisscrossing Moldova, meeting with farmers, universities, ministries and industry groups to discuss plans for establishing a national cooperative extension service. The visit is the latest step in an ongoing partnership between NC State and the Technical University of Moldova (TUM) that aims to adapt North Carolina’s land-grant model to Moldovan needs.
“It was a whirlwind tour of the country,” said David Suchoff, an Extension specialist in CALS who visited Moldova for the first time on the trip. “We drove all over the country, meeting with numerous groups every day, from colleges and universities to farms and farmers, to ag industry folks and businesses.”
The visit came just days after a national election in Moldova that observers described as strongly pro-European Union, a result that many university partners saw as a turning point. Suchoff said he could sense momentum.
“It’s a small country, and I knew that it was a developing country going into it, but at the same time, you could see that there’s a lot of growth right around the corner,” Suchoff said. “You could tell that there’s kind of a lot of excitement.”
Source : ncsu.edu