An Urban's Rural View
Why We Still Need Cutting-Edge Ag Research
Among farmers and ranchers, agricultural research is a motherhood and apple-pie issue. Everyone's for it. Everyone "knows" ag research is a good thing that taxpayers should help finance.
Yet financing it hasn't proved an easy sell in Washington, even though every Congressman has agricultural constituents of one kind or another. For decades, government funding for ag research has paled compared to outlays for research on things like national defense, human health and energy. For almost two decades Uncle Sam's contributions to ag research have been declining.
American agriculture, it seems, is a victim of its own success. No agricultural system in history has come close to growing as much food. So, what's the problem, our public servants might well ask. Why, at a time of huge federal budget deficits, do we need to invest more in ag research when our farms already produce such an abundance of affordable food? Won't private companies reap much of the benefit? If they want the research, why not let them pay for it?
In 2014, Congress asked a different question: Could public investments be used to leverage private investments, multiplying the bang for the public's buck? The answer was yes, and the result was a provision in the 2014 farm bill creating the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, a nonprofit organization that builds public-private partnerships to increase scientific and technological research in agriculture.
In 2015 Sally Rockey became FFAR's first executive director. A glance at her resume explains why she was chosen for the job. A PhD entomologist, she spent much of the previous 30 years overseeing research grants at USDA and later the National Institutes of Health. She knows both the lay of the land and the need to get the most out of the limited resources available.
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