Our Impact
Making A Difference in Our County
University of Georgia Cooperative Extension is working hard for its constituents. The following are examples of Extension’s impact in the county over the past year.
Agriculture and Natural Resources
The Peanut Burrower Bug causes significant economic losses on an annual basis in Georgia with few effective management options. The options we currently have can negatively affect the environment, and have been used without an accurate method to assess actual risk of infestation or injury. Previous research conducted by past Emanuel County UGA Extension agent, Mark Crosby and Dr. Mark Abney found that monitoring the Peanut Burrower Bug using pit-fall traps assisted in determining when management was necessary though no validated thresholds existed. UGA Extension faculty used trap data to help growers make insecticide management decisions. Fields with few or no bugs were not treated, but those where high numbers of bugs were captured were treated with granular chlorpyrifos. Using the data provided, local county agents and the UGA Peanut Entomology Team continue to use research and survey data to provide guidance to growers on management options and decisions. During the 2020 growing season, Emanuel Peanut and Grain consultant Mark Crosby and Emanuel County agent Savannah Tanner partnered to monitor over 13,000 peanut acres in Emanuel, Candler, and Johnson counties to assist in providing outreach, education, and management options to local peanut producers.
4-H Youth Development
Since the fall of 2020, Emanuel County 4-H Agent, Jakyn Tyson, has collaborated with faculty of Emanuel County Institute, a middle-high
school located in Twin City, GA to provide financial
education for its graduating seniors. To date, two graduating classes have completed the program, taking sessions on personal finance and money management.
The first session focused on needs, wants, and how one's personal values can influence each. During their second meeting, students learned about budgeting and completed an activity on personal spending plans. They received information on average costs of housing, utilities, groceries, and other monthly expenses and were encouraged to discuss with their families how much they actually “cost” each month. During the third group session, a representative from Durden Banking Company met with the students to discuss personal credit. Tyson and the banking professional developed an interactive presentation that gave students the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge on establishing, maintaining, and using credit. In the spring of 2022, a fourth session on identity theft was added to inform students about their increased risk of becoming a victim and how to monitor their own credit reports.
The annual culminating event is the “Your Reality” financial simulation. Before the program began, students submitted their eventual career aspirations to their counselor. Tyson researched typical salaries for those careers in Southeast Georgia. Using that research, students were assigned monthly income levels from which they had to manage their household expenses. Students were also randomly assigned a number of children that they had to support as a part of their household. Additional money was also withheld from their net pay to illustrate how much was left after taxes.
Through the exercise, students had to visit each station of the simulation at least once to demonstrate how much their monthly living expenses would cost. If the student ran out of money, they had to amend their budget and change their lifestyle choices or get a second job to meet the expenses. Costs for housing, insurance, cars, groceries, and other expenses were developed using actual data from Emanuel County and comparable areas. The stations were staffed by school faculty, community volunteers, and Extension staff that assisted the students in making decisions based on their monthly income from their chosen careers and individual life situation.
A total of 115 graduating seniors have participated in the program. Of the 72 evaluations that were completed and submitted, 46% self-reported as female and 30.4% considered themselves black or African American. The evaluation asked students to assess their knowledge of personal finance management both before and after participating in the program. Results indicate that knowledge and confidence of participants increased in all nine topic areas relating to financial management and planning.
In addition to assessing knowledge gained, students were also given the opportunity to provide open-ended responses to the question “What was the best part of the Your Reality program?”. Nearly 52% of participants in the simulation expressed that the simulation had made an impact on the way that they looked at managing money, how their career choices could affect their lifestyle, and the actual cost of managing a household. One participant of the program wrote “It makes you realize how much thought you have to put in when deciding your career and how to spend your money”. Many of the respondents commented that they had learned what it costs to live every month and that “Being able to see what it’s going to be like in the real world” made them realize that making a conscious effort to save was necessary.
“Your Reality” gave graduating seniors at ECI an opportunity to see themselves as an active participant in their own future and to see that opportunities for self-determination were available, but hinged on their individual life choices. Another student actually mentioned that their favorite part was that they “… got to visualize what my future could look like”.