Concerns about the relevance of agricultural research and extension in a changing society are complicated. They include funding challenges and a struggle to identify constituents, while adequately meeting their needs. Funding often follows relevance, however, and it may be that the questions of relevance in a modern, information-inundated, technologically-savvy and networked age prove to be the most profound and difficult. If the foundational concept in research and extension history holds—that a person may doubt what they are told but not what they do themselves—then these questions and concerns should explore how it operates in the digital age of social networks, big data, comprehensive modeling and vast visualization capabilities. These are matters to be worked out at the local level, within universities and among communities or constituencies, as well as in the halls of Congress as it debates a farm bill.