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Got Chesapeake Milk? By Angie Brown
Because the Dairy Network Partnership is a nonprofit organization, the staff is very small, and without the help of the Penn State students, the necessary work on the Environmental Quality Initiative project could not have been accomplished. —Lori Sandman	Drink your milk. But make sure it’s environmentally friendly milk. Students in Ann Major’s Communications 473, Public Relations Problems, class are trying to find a better way to communicate what has become a more complicated message than Mom’s familiar refrain. In an ongoing collaborative effort between the College of Communications and the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State, Major’s students are researching how best to educate consumers about the agricultural- environmental problems in the Chesapeake Bay area. Major is assistant professor of communications in the College of Communications. Last year, as part of the Rodale Institute’s Dairy Network Partnership (DNP) and with the aid of a Keystone 21 grant funded by the Kellogg Foundation, the students developed a media directory of all environmental and business reporters in the Chesapeake Bay region and designed media kits to launch “Chesapeake Milk,” which bears the Environmental Quality Initiative (EQI) label. In addition, the students conducted focus groups in the State College, Pa., area to investigate whether consumers would be willing to spend five extra cents on a half-gallon of milk to reward dairy farmers who engage in environmental “best management” practices. Janice Pitchford, a 1999 Penn State graduate with a degree in public relations, is a former Schreyer Honors Scholar who interned with the Dairy Network Partnership during the summer of 1998. She worked on the project throughout her senior year and was so inspired by the project that she based her senior thesis on it. “The project really took our class beyond the typical classroom setting and into the heart of public relations planning,” said Pitchford, who now works for O’Keefe & Company Inc. in Broomall, Pa. “As I now am employed by a public relations agency and manage two accounts, I am realizing more and more how much Communications 473 helped me learn how to write communications proposals and plans, how to work with a team and how to evaluate public relations programs. This type of hands-on learning is extremely important.” Acknowledging the value of the hands-on experience students have gained, Major adds that the students gain perspective on where consumers get their information, while they do practical work that benefits their communities. “One of the long-term goals of the project is to utilize the public relations classes as a means of achieving the land-grant mission of Penn State, which combines classroom teaching with improving the lives of Pennsylvania citizens,” Major noted. According to Lori Sandman, project director of the Dairy Network Partnership, the students’ contributions have proven invaluable. “Because the DNP is a nonprofit organization, the staff is very small, and without the help of the Penn State students, the necessary work on the EQI project could not have been accomplished,” she said. In fact, the DNP’s work has been so successful that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has provided a second grant to the DNP, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and the Maryland Department of Agriculture, on which Les Lanyon, professor of agronomy, and Major will serve as associates. Lanyon and Major also will continue to serve as co-principal investigators on the Keystone 21 grant supported by the Kellogg Foundation. Major already has plans to take her next group of Communications 473 students to a local dairy farm so they will have “firsthand experience” on which to base the development of a consumer survey of 500 adults in eastern Pennsylvania.