An agronomist, by definition, is an expert in the science of soil management and crop production. In Baldwin County, the title belongs to Carmen Flamini, an agent with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System who specializes in home grounds, gardens, and pests — and whose route from Chile to Daphne ran through a Georgia restaurant kitchen, an elementary school classroom, and Auburn University.
Extension work, explained
The Alabama Cooperative Extension System is the educational outreach arm of the state’s two land-grant universities, Alabama A&M and Auburn. Its agents translate university research into practical advice for homeowners, farmers, and schools, county by county. Flamini covers Baldwin, Butler, Conecuh, and Escambia counties, answering questions that range from tomato blight to termite swarms.
Her own science training is recent but deep. A native of Chile, she came to the United States in 1999 for what was supposed to be a one-week visit to a cousin in Dalton, Georgia — it was July, winter in South America, and she had a week of vacation. One week became six months, and a man named Pete became her husband. The couple settled in Dalton, where he ran an Italian restaurant.
From STEM classrooms to soil tests
Raising two children in Georgia, Flamini noticed that elementary students had few chances for hands-on science outside the classroom. So she built it: she started the first STEM program in an elementary school outside Atlanta, using gardening and greenhouses to teach the math, biology, chemistry, and life science that agronomy bundles together. She also taught environmental science and life science at Dalton State College.
When her children began looking at Auburn University, the family relocated to Alabama for in-state tuition. They toured the state hunting for the right fit and chose Daphne — close to farms, beaches, and restaurants. Flamini then earned a master of agricultural science degree from Auburn and joined Alabama Extension in August 2023. Her children followed her into science, both now studying at Auburn.
Community gardens across the coastal area
Extension agents measure their work in other people’s gardens, and Flamini’s project list reads like a map of Baldwin County’s civic green spaces. She teaches the region’s 13-week Master Gardener program, which carries a two-year waiting list. She advises the Hope Community on its Anna T. Jeanes School teaching garden and is training volunteers at the Fairhope Rotary Youth Club for a planned community garden. At the Pelican’s Nest in Fairhope, she works with volunteers maintaining native milkweed and pollinator beds, and at the Nature Connect School in Montrose, she is helping design an erosion-control garden alongside vegetable and pollinator plantings. At Fairhope West Elementary, she is collaborating on a STEM reading garden.
Her advice to schools echoes her own teaching career: start small, and pick a garden type that matches the curriculum. Rain gardens, pollinator gardens, decomposition beds, vegetable plots, and life-cycle gardens each offer hands-on lessons that plug into existing classes. “Teachers make a change in the world,” she says, “and it is important to enable kids to be inquisitive and feel passionate about nature and science at an early age.”
Free advice, by email
Part of an Extension agent’s job is answering the public’s questions directly — homeowners can email Flamini with horticulture and pest problems, and she works through diagnoses one sample at a time. She is a particular evangelist for soil testing: Baldwin County gardeners can pick up test kits, mail soil samples to the Auburn lab for pH and nutrient analysis, and adjust their beds accordingly. Her frequent warning to backyard gardeners is blunt — if your soil is out of balance, nothing will grow, no matter how much you water.
Extension offices across the region offer classes through the year on backyard gardening, and Flamini’s schedule of workshops continues to grow along with the county’s population. For newcomers to Gulf Coast gardening — with its sand, its humidity, and its weaponized summer — that advice line may be the most valuable crop she produces.
Between the Master Gardener cohorts, the school gardens, and the steady stream of emails from frustrated tomato growers, Flamini is building the kind of extension footprint that outlasts any single season. The science of soil management, it turns out, travels well from the Andes to Mobile Bay.