With any assigned responsibility should come a freedom to decide, to act, to change, to control one's destiny. In the case of appropriate educational programming to serve the proportionally increasing number of small farm clientele, Extension has some challenges. We must face the challenges in ways that fulfill the Extension mission and also control our Extension Service destiny. This paper comments on some of these challenges as well as the demographic, historical, political, social and economic characteristics surrounding them. The institutional realities of limited staff resources, unlimited potential mission and the often unclear perceptions of both private citizens and public officials concerning Extension are recognized.