Smith-Lever Act

The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 established the Cooperative Extension Service in the United States, creating a formal partnership between the US Department of Agriculture and the land-grant colleges founded a half-century earlier under the Morrill Act to carry agricultural research and practical farming knowledge directly to working farmers through county-based extension agents. The system built a nationwide, publicly funded channel for disseminating improved crop varieties, pest control methods, soil management and home economics practices, and it became a foundational institution of 20th-century American agricultural modernization, credited with substantially raising farm productivity across the country in the decades that followed.