SALEM, Ohio — Chris Penrose took a little while to get his priorities straight. He’s the sixth generation to farm his family’s land in Morgan County, Ohio, but when he took a job with Ohio State University Extension, he felt pulled in too many directions. He needed to prioritize.
“I made it a point to make sure that faith and family is first,” he said. “My job as an extension educator was second, and farming came with whatever time I had left over. After I came to that realization, I felt a lot better.”
Now, after 35 years working in extension, Penrose can put the farm first. Well, second. Faith and family still come first. Penrose retired from OSU Extension in Morgan County at the end of 2023, closing out a fruitful career as an extension educator who specialized in grazing and forages. He recently talked to Farm and Dairy to reflect on his career and talk about the future.
“The biggest thing I notice is I’m not in a rush anymore,” he said. “I go out and work on the farm and if I’m tired, I stop.”
Beginnings
Penrose’s path to becoming an educator is maybe a little ironic. He’s the first to admit he wasn’t a star student in school.
“I’m somebody that barely graduated high school,” he said. “I was in the lower third of my class.”
He worked a few menial jobs before getting back into farming and later enrolling in community college courses at what is now Washington State College of Ohio, in Marietta.
“I realized after going to school for a few weeks that if I paid attention, I could do good,” he said. He earned his associate’s degree, “met some people in extension and the rest is history.”
He started at Ohio State University in 1986, working in reproductive physiology as an undergraduate. When he was pursuing his master’s in 1989, he did a summer internship at Hocking County Extension.
“They liked me so much I just stayed,” he said. “Sept. 4, 1989 was my first day in extension.”
Extension
Extension didn’t just give him a job. It’s how he met his wife, Nicola. A secretary in the Hocking County office set them up on a blind date not too long after he started working there.
After their first date, they discussed if they wanted to see each other again.
“We got married a year later, in September 1990,” he said.
Nicola worked as a nurse, so she could switch jobs to move around with Penrose. Together the couple got through good days and bad, including when Penrose missed out on a job in Muskingum County and had to move to northwest Ohio. He called it the “toughest day in my whole career.”
He worked in Seneca and Wyandot counties for a couple of years in the early ‘90s before moving back down to southern Ohio in 1994 when a job in Athens County opened up. He worked there for six years when an ag and 4-H job came up in Morgan County. That’s where he moved and stayed for the rest of his career.
Farming
Penrose’s farm has been in the family since April 1824, when his ancestors bought the land from the federal government. Many of the farm’s original structures are still standing, including the original barn, a spring house and a smokehouse. After Penrose moved home to work, they built a new house on the farm.
The couple had two sons. One works in the Air Force and is stationed near Washington, D.C. His younger son, Jordan, is the OSU Ag Extension Educator in Gallia County. His daughter-in-law is the vo-ag teacher at Fairfield Union High School. Jordan is also active on the family farm, where they raise beef cattle.
Prioritizing extension over the farm never led to many conflicts, except when it was time to make hay, Penrose said. In fact, farming made him a better extension educator and vice versa.
In 2017, when they experienced buckeye poisoning in their cattle, he was one of the first ones to raise the alarm about it. More recently, he and his son discovered a new invasive weed growing on their farm — small carpetgrass — which Jordan wrote about for the OSU Beef Team.
Some of Chris Penrose’s first work in extension in Hocking County was around how to extend the grazing season and use stockpiling. Some of his early work was trials with turnips.
He practices what he preaches on his farm, for example using a hay field he last cut in July to stockpile for spring calving through March. He’s also written about this practice in his All About Grazing columns for Farm and Dairy.
“I won’t have to feed any more hay,” he said. “The cows will be in a stockpiled field to calve with no mud, and their body condition goes up as they start calving.”
His favorite part of the job was working with his clients, the farmers. Back when he started working in extension, Penrose said the extension agents were the Google for agriculture. Now people can search the internet to answer farming questions, but it won’t replace an educator’s ability to tailor information to each farmer’s operation.
“They don’t have an educator’s ability to diagnose, learn philosophy, learn priorities, learn limitations and to come up with the best solution for them,” he said.
Though most people look forward to retirement, Penrose said he was scared to leap into the next part of his life. He enjoyed the work he did and the people he worked with.
“Extension has been my family. It was all I really knew. I loved my job. I loved my coworkers,” he said.
He hasn’t had any trouble filling the time. He applied for and received emeritus status with Ohio State, which gives him the ability to keep doing research and fieldwork. He’s got plans to help out with a study on ways to control Johnson grass in permanent hay fields.
He’s also been giving back to his community, attending Rotary meetings, re-engaging with his local Masonic Lodge and joining the foundation for Washington State College of Ohio. He and his wife endowed a scholarship at Washington State for Morgan County residents who are non-traditional students, like he was when he went back to school.
“The only thing we’re going to take with us when we die is what we give away,” he said.
