Mid-Atlantic Poultry Consortium: a department head's viewpoint on regionalization.

A document outlining possible areas of coordination and cooperation among university faculty to meet the research, extension, and teaching needs of the poultry industries in the Mid-Atlantic region (i.e., in the states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina) has been developed. Poultry-oriented faculty in the region's Colleges of Agriculture and Colleges of Veterinary Medicine in the 1862 and 1890 land-grant institutions participated to varying degrees in the development of the document. Poultry scientists with the ARS/USDA, Beltsville, MD, have also expressed interest in and provided input to the plan. Three university-based committees addressed potential avenues of cooperation for academic programs, teaching, research, extension, and technology transfer. Input from those committees was summarized and presented as a basic concept paper for the development of a Mid-Atlantic Poultry Consortium at the Poultry Extension Symposium at the Poultry Science Association's annual meeting in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in 1995. Meetings of faculty from the participating institutions have been held twice yearly at the Southeastern Poultry and Egg Association Congress in Atlanta, GA, and at the annual Poultry Science Association meetings to specifically discuss strategies for moving forward with the plan. Unfortunately, for a number of different reasons, buy-in by individual faculty at the various institutions has, at best, been very limited. Nevertheless, some progress has been made toward increasing the amount of regional cooperation underway. Most of the cooperation to date has been in interstate extension programming, with reciprocal use of specialists with different expertise between two states, and with the joint planning of regionally based educational conferences. Some joint extension publications and a few joint applied research or demonstration projects are also underway. Currently, however, no program is in place that involves all of the region'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 poultry-oriented faculty in the region linked via an e-mail listserve, so that individuals with needs for partnering can freely communicate their needs to others in the region who might be interested in cooperating with them.