SDSU Ag-Bio Communications, along with its nine employees, have been cut due to the nearly $4.7 million in cuts to SDSU.

“The ag communications unit will be going away as part of budget cuts,” said Lowell Haag, director and production manager for Ag-Bio Communications.  “… part of the staff will be gone at the end of the fiscal year in June, while others will continue until October. All of us [Ag and Bio Communications employees] have received a letter saying your contract is not being renewed or a reduction in force…”

Ag-Bio Communications is responsible for packaging information to be dispersed throughout South Dakota.

“The majority of the work we do at Ag-Bio communications is packaging the educational information gathered by researchers and the experiment station… and write it up in such a way that everyday people in South Dakota can understand it without big research language,” Haag said.  “We [the employees] are the people who then do the packaging work, whether it’s an extension publication or flyers or television program.”

Lyle Olson, journalism and mass communications professor, said he was surprised to see Ag-Bio communications cut.

“[I’m] kind of surprised because one of SDSU’s core reasons for being a land grant university is to provide extension information to the state and that’s what they did,” Olson said.

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