MID-ATLANTIC POULTRY CONSORTIUM - A DEPARTMENT HEADS VIEWPOINT ON REGIONALIZATION

A document outlining possible areas of coordination and cooperation am ong university faculty to meet the research, extension, and teaching n eeds of the poultry industries in the Mid-Atlantic region (i.e., in th e states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina) has been developed. Poultry-orien ted faculty in the region's Colleges of Agriculture and Colleges of Ve terinary Medicine in the 1862 and 1890 land-grant institutions partici pated to varying degrees in the development of the document. Poultry s cientists with the ARS/USDA, Beltsville, MD, have also expressed inter est in and provided input to the plan. Three university-based committe es addressed potential avenues of cooperation for academic programs, t eaching, research, extension, and technology transfer. Input from thos e committees was summarized and presented as a basic concept paper for the development of a Mid-Atlantic Poultry Consortium at the Poultry E xtension Symposium at the Poultry Science Association's annual meeting in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in 1995. Meetings of faculty from the p articipating institutions have been held twice yearly at the Southeast ern Poultry and Egg Association Congress in Atlanta, GA, and at the an nual Poultry Science Association meetings to specifically discuss stra tegies for moving forward with the plan. Unfortunately, for a number o f different reasons, buy-in by individual faculty at the various insti tutions has, at best, been very limited. Nevertheless, some progress h as been made toward increasing the amount of regional cooperation unde rway. Most of the cooperation to date has been in interstate extension programming, with reciprocal use of specialists with different expert ise between two states, and with the joint planning of regionally base d educational conferences. Some joint extension publications and a few joint applied research or demonstration projects are also underway. C urrently, however, no program is in place that involves all of the reg ion's university-based poultry groups in a single program effort. The slow development of such an effort is partially due to difficulties in communication. An attempt is currently being made to get all of the p oultry-oriented faculty in the region linked via an e-mail listserve, so that individuals with needs for partnering can freely communicate t heir needs to others in the region who might be interested in cooperat ing with them.