More Anti-Hunger Efforts
217,348 pounds of food can fill a lot of grocery carts. But more importantly, it can fill a lot of previously empty plates--and that’s why USDA employees recently “went all out” to collect that amount of food.

    It was all part of the Department’s fourth annual food drive, titled “Building Partnerships to End Hunger.” Sylvia Montgomery, a program analyst in the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service and that agency’s food drive coordinator, noted that the food drive was held from December 11, 2000 to January 5, 2001, with USDA employees at headquarters and field offices around the country participating. “We netted 217,348 pounds of food, as well as over $3,700 in contributions,” she affirmed.

    Pat Washington, a technology management specialist in the Natural Resources Conservation Service and food drive coordinator for her agency and for the State Food and Agriculture Councils, added that the food and monetary donations were given to food banks, community shelters, feeding centers, and other charitable institutions both in the Washington, DC metropolitan area and at sites near USDA field offices.

    The leadership of this food drive was a joint partnership between the Food and Nutrition Service and CSREES.

    Becky Rios, outreach coordinator for the Farm Service Agency in Idaho, based in Boise, and coordinator for that agency’s food drive and gleaning activities statewide, noted that, over the past several years, employee-sponsored food donations--including food drives and food recovery and gleaning activities--have garnered literally millions of pounds of non-perishable food items.

    Previous employee activities to encourage food donations have included such novel and creative initiatives as contests in which the team of USDA employees which did not collect the most in food contributions would have to wash dishes for a noon meal for 130 people in Athens, Ga., an “ugly tie” contest in Alexandria, Va., and a 'food fight for charity’–which wasn’t so much in the “throw the food” spirit of the movie “Animal House” but rather involved which USDA team could bring in the most cases of food and sacks of potatoes for a food bank in Rapid City, S.D.

    The January 1999 USDA News carried a story about some of those initiatives.

.“Here is just part of the 217,348 pounds of food that USDA employees around the country collected as part of our fourth annual food drive,” notes Alma Hobbs, co-chair of that effort. --Photo by Ken Hammond

    “Our recently completed food drive tried to build upon some of those successful strategies from the past,” said Pat Duncan, a computer programmer in the National Agricultural Statistics Service and that agency’s food drive coordinator, “with our own versions of contests, bake sales, and pizza party prizes for the most food collected.”

    "This Food Drive,” emphasized Alma Hobbs, CSREES’s deputy administrator for families, 4-H, and nutrition and co-chair of USDA’s most recent effort, “reflects the professional and personal commitment of USDA employees to ending hunger.”
--Candy Mountjoy

“You could be located on a Forest Service ranger district anywhere from Maine to California, serving on an engine crew, a firefighting crew, a smokejumper crew, a helicopter crew, a hand crew--wherever our firefighting needs are at the time, and based on your capabilities,” notes Jacob Gipson (right), a fire engine operator on the Forest Service’s “Dew Drop” engine crew, based in Pioneer, Calif., on the Eldorado National Forest, and a former FS 'Hotshot’ firefighter near Lake Elsinore, Calif. He is talking with would-be job applicants at an FS job fair in Washington, DC, where he was helping to recruit 3,500 new FS employees, nationwide, for the 2001 fire season. --Photo by Karl Perry

    Jennifer Plyler, a Forest Service public affairs specialist who is the communications account manager for the agency’s National Fire Plan, noted that this hiring effort is part of that Plan. “The National Fire Plan is a $1.9 billion undertaking developed by USDA and the U.S. Department of the Interior,” she said, “to restore landscapes and help communities affected by last season’s severe fires, ensure sufficient wildland firefighting resources in the future, and reduce future impacts of wildland fires in such situations as when homes have been built close to forests or grasslands.”

    Plyler advised that more than 92,000 fires broke out across the nation last summer, consuming nearly seven million acres of public lands. “At the height of last year’s fire season,” she said, “nearly 30,000 people--including federal personnel and others from 48 states, four countries, and five military battalions--battled the fires.”

    “With an increased firefighting force,” she added, “we expect that natural resources will be better protected, fewer small fires will become large, we’ll reduce the threat of fires in forests near communities, and we’ll be able to lower the cost of suppressing large fires.”

    Plyler said that over 1,500 of the 3,500 new hires are to be permanent positions. The other jobs are to be temporary or seasonal, lasting up to six months per year, with opportunities to become permanent seasonal employees. Most of the 3,500 positions are to be forestry aids and technician jobs assigned to firefighting positions.

    “Our goal is to have all 3,500 positions filled by June,” she emphasized.

    Last October, when the agency determined how many firefighter positions were needed, the first question was “How can we create a more diverse work force, attract quality applicants, and train this new firefighting cadre for the tasks at hand?”

I’ve got plenty of good things to tell 'em--so let’s get started,” affirms Mary Farnsworth (right), a fire specialist at FS’s headquarters office in Washington, DC, and a former FS 'Hotshot’ firefighter in Redmond, Ore. She and Dragobert Sharp, a fire management officer based in Meadville, Miss., on the Homochitto National Forest, are comparing notes before participating in recruiting activities at a job fair in Washington, DC. --Photo by Bruce McNeil

    “One of our first steps was to develop a hiring strategy,” Plyler explained. “So we formed strike teams’.”

    Those strike teams’ consisted of FS employees whose main goal was to educate would-be applicants about the types of firefighting jobs available. Strike team members identified 18 initial cities where FS would host a job fair--“which is a great venue to reach people living in both urban and rural communities,” she noted.

    According to Florence Pruitt, the supervisor of administrative functions for the agency’s Pacific Southwest Region, headquartered in Vallejo, Calif., and the person responsible for organizing, managing, and tracking the strike teams, the teams showed up at shopping malls--with firefighting equipment as visual aids--canvassed college campuses, and contacted local congressional district offices. FS employees in Vallejo arranged for Joe Reyes, an FS battalion chief with the Mariposa/Minarets Ranger District in North Fork, Calif., on the Sierra National Forest, to appear on the “Good Morning Sacramento” TV show to pitch this recruitment effort. “What followed was a deluge of applicants in what ended up being our most widely attended job fair nationwide,” Pruitt affirmed.

    Janet Brandt-Jackson, a recruitment specialist in human resources with FS’s Vallejo regional office and principle organizer for that office’s job fairs, said that “We coined the phrase 'bringing the woods to the 'hood’--and through that approach, the Forest Service was able to spread the word about employment opportunities, reinforce its commitment to targeted community outreach, and market natural resources all at the same time.”

"This field of work will certainly offer comparable challenges, just like your current job,” affirms Anita Adkins (left), an FS human resources specialist on the George Washington-Jefferson National Forest, headquartered in Roanoke, Va., as she watches a Washington, DC police officer review a firefighter-related application at a recent job fair in Washington, DC. --Photo by Bruce McNeil

    Wilhelmina Bratton, FS’s national partnership coordinator in State and Private Forestry, and Billy Terry, chief of the Fire Training Branch in State and Private Forestry, both at FS’s headquarters office in Washington, DC, launched “Operation Hit the Streets.” “We visited the offices of DC political leaders to spread the word about our fire hiring effort,” Bratton noted. “It resulted in diverse applicants,” added Terry, “including DC police officers and firefighters.”

    For potential applicants who were unable to attend the job fairs, staffers from FS and the Office of Personnel Management established separate web sites, both of which provided information about jobs and applications.

    Plyler noted that FS held 30 job fairs in 11 states and Washington, DC during January and February. “Over 5,400 people attended, and we received around 30,000 applications for our 3,500 positions,” she said.

    “That’s my definition of a successful recruiting effort!”
--Tina Terrell

From Old Tires, More “Crumb”

    265 million tires are discarded in this country every year. But specialists with the Agricultural Research Service have created a new way to recycle them--and they’re using technology adopted from the cotton gin.

    Stanley Anthony, supervisory agricultural engineer and research leader at ARS’s Cotton Ginning Research Unit in Stoneville, Miss., noted that recycled rubber can be used to make new tires, as well as running tracks, athletic shoes, soaker hoses, ball-point pens, tugboat bumpers, livestock stall mats, speed bumps, and other goods.

    “Currently,” he advised, “companies typically cut tires into small pieces. Then they pulverize the rubber and polyester/nylon fiber components--either by grinding them or by using a cryogenic, or freezing, treatment, which is followed by an 'explosion’ of that substance.”

    Anthony noted that this process recovers over half the rubber--but the rest, which is a non-biodegradable rubber-fiber mixture, goes to landfills. That recovered rubber, called “crumb,” is worth about $500 per ton.

    “So what we did,” he said, “was to use technology related to cotton ginning to develop a process that can recover, as separate materials, the rubber-fiber mixture that had been going to the landfills.”

    Anthony and others developed a machine--“as big as a truck,” he observed--that operates similarly to machinery in the cotton industry which removes leaves and other plant parts off of the raw, unprocessed cotton before the “ginning process” separates cotton fibers from cotton seeds.

To the uninitiated, these three objects may look like two oversized dust balls and a saucer of soot. But to ARS specialists in Stoneville, Miss., the items represent how they have developed and applied new technology--similar in principle to that used in a cotton gin--to alleviate an environmental problem. Specifically, they take remains of old tires that have already been pulverized into a non-biodegradable fiber-rubber mixture (top image)--and that would normally be headed to a landfill--and instead process that mixture further. The result is to extract even more rubber called “crumb” (left image) that is reusable. What remains is a minimum of remaining residue called “fluff” (right image). --Photo by Stanley Anthony

    “Using that same approach,” he explained, “our big machine in effect 'bites’ into the rubber-fiber mixture, using steel-toothed cylinders that rotate and push the mixture against metal gratings.” That forces the rubber off the fiber. “Then, that recovered rubber contains only about one percent fiber, so it’s still marketable.” He noted that no market exists yet for the fiber, or “fluff,” that remains, but that estimates are that it might be worth $300 per ton in the future.

    ARS’s machine, which is located in its lab in Stoneville, is the only one in existence.

    Anthony said that in March 1999 ARS filed a patent application for its ’new and improved’ machine with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Ultimately, that patent was granted in March 2001.

    “With this new technology,” he affirmed, “less than five percent of the original tire would go to the landfill--which saves tire recycling companies resources, and/or which may generate additional income from recycling those same resources.”

 “For struggling companies which recycle tires for a living, this could make the difference between staying in business or going out of business.”
--Tara Weaver-Missick