Search the advice published by university Cooperative Extension services in one place, and find the Extension office, Master Gardeners and labs near you. Extension is free, research-based and local. Why Bizon points you there.
Try: squash vine borer · soil test · pruning fruit trees · deer resistant plants · backyard chickens
Cooperative Extension is the public outreach arm of the land-grant universities, run with the USDA and county governments. Every state has one, and most counties have an office. Extension educators and trained Master Gardener volunteers answer garden, farm and pest questions, run soil testing and plant diagnostic labs, and publish fact sheets written for the local climate. Most of it is free.
Land-grant universities come from three laws: the 1862 Morrill Act founded one in each state, the 1890 act added historically Black universities, and a 1994 act added tribal colleges. All three run Extension programs, listed together for each state below the search.
The search reads an index Bizon builds from the public sitemaps of Extension websites: the page titles and addresses those sites publish for search engines. It keeps pages about gardens, farms, lawns, trees, pests, plants, soil, water and livestock, and leaves out staff pages, event listings and site menus. A search matches the words in page titles, ranks pages whose title is mostly the thing searched first, and puts your state's pages at the top. Each result opens on the Extension site itself.
The search runs in your browser. What you type and your location are not sent to Bizon or anyone else; the page downloads only the small parts of the index it needs.
The index covers the Extension sites that publish a sitemap, which is most of the large ones. A few sites don't publish one or turn away automated readers, so their pages aren't in the index. Their programs are still in the directory, and the "search this site" link on your state's card searches any of them through Google. The index is rebuilt every few months, so a page added since may be missing.
Planting dates, pest timing, recommended varieties and pesticide rules differ from state to state. Pages from your own state, or a neighboring one, fit best. For a question the pages don't answer, your county office or Ask Extension can help.
Most countries run agriculture and horticulture advice through a government agency rather than universities. Those for Canada's provinces, the UK, Ireland, Australia's states and others are listed in the directory, and searches show the ones for your country when your location is outside the US.