GOOGLE before GOOGLE

AgLinks

Recently I was asked; “What was your greatest work achievement?” A hard question to answer.

         I have had a lot of fun during my career.

         I explored America as an Eisenhower Fellow. Lectured at the University of the South Pacific. Trained doctors in Vietnam in training ways, and I ran numerous workshops for Asian managers. I gave advice to the Prime Minister in PNG and was a technical adviser in Taiwan for three years.

         I suppose my greatest success was also my greatest disappointment.

         After returning from America in 1968 I set up a program called AgLinks. These were a series of fact sheets, written in basic English to give farmers and horticulturists the latest research findings. Basically, they were ‘how to do thing’ sheets.

         The Journal of Agriculture had been a communication tool to get messages out to food producers. It was set up in 1910 and published by the Department of Agriculture.  In 1960 it was sold off to a commercial company. This didn’t last long –  It soon went to the wall.    

         Against my wishes, I inherited some of the Journal staff and was told to set up an Information Section for the Department of Agriculture.   

         I recruited a number of journalists with rural backgrounds to write some simple fact sheets. We called them AgLinks because they were a link between scientists and farmers.

         As Dr. Clive Dalton once said; They were Google before Google.”

         We must have produced the best part of 1,000 topics.     If a farmer wanted to build a new yard, get a stock remedy, spray a weed, or grow a new crop, we had a sheet containing recommendations to help them do the task.         These contained the latest research information and the best-known recommendations.  It would have been ideal to have been put online when computers came in.           When the Department of Agriculture was closed down these rural journalists were all made redundant and the AgLink series ended up in the dump.

         I left before all this happened.  I was working for the United Nations Development Programme at that time.  

         When I returned to New Zealand I was upset at what had happened. It was such a simple way to get information out to primary producers.

         Today we are having trouble getting the latest research finding implemented by farmers and horticulturists.  When will we learn? Food production is so important to the welfare of so many countries.

Geoffrey Moss(mossassociates.co.nz)

“The future will only be as good as we have the courage to make it.”