What is the Alabama Cooperative Extension System?

The Alabama Cooperative Extension System (ACES) was founded in 1915 as the Alabama Extension Service to help teach various skills to farmers and improve the lives of rural Alabamians. This organization accumulated an office in each of Alabama’s 67 counties with home base being at the state's land-grant institutions, Auburn University and Alabama A&M University. While not a land-grant institution, Tuskegee University also plays an important role in this system.

The beginning of the extension system came with the Morrill Act of 1862. This gave each state 30,000 acres of public land for each member of its congressional delegation. These allotments of land were sold, and the money was used to provide means for colleges to teach agriculture and other practical classes. This is also the act that made Auburn University the initial headquarters for the program.

This act was later followed up with the Morrill Act of 1890, which secured continued funding for the extension program and enabled the Huntsville Normal School, later Alabama A&M (1891), to become the state’s second land-grant institution.

In 1914, the Smith-Lever Act provided federal matching funds to states allowing for the creation of county offices and formalized the extension model. This act also stated all extension work done with the United States Department of Agriculture would be done through land-grant schools.

As time passed, the extension service started helping locals with more farm-related things such as livestock production, agronomy, horticulture, plant disease prevention and animal disease management.

In 1995, Alabama’s extension service became the United State’s first unified service by combining the efforts of Auburn and Alabama A&M. Tuskegee continues to operate on its own system focusing largely on sustainability and community resource development but works closely with Auburn and Alabama A&M.

More recently, the system has shifted from a county-focused model to one where several regional agents are responsible for specializing in a topic or skill area and delivering information and programs accordingly.

Auburn University’s longest running contribution to the extension system is the “Old Rotation.” This experiment field was an important part of combatting boll weevils around 1910 which helped improve the lives of poor farmers. The “Old Rotation” is the oldest continuous cotton experiment in the world and is the third oldest field crop experiment on the same site in the United States making it an important part of extension history.