Support for Public Agricultural R&D Should Be Enhanced!
There is no doubt that advancements in U.S. agricultural productivity have relied on and resulted from new technologies that are based on results from sound research. A significant portion of these new technologies have come from the public sector that has been supported by tax and commodity dollars. In fact, public institutions provide the backbone of the U.S. agricultural research sector since essentially all of the agricultural researchers in both the public and private sectors were and are trained at these public institutions. In most cases, the researchers’ training at the public institutions included the conduct of their initial research. Thus, in essence all of the new technologies that have been developed in support of U.S. agriculture have their roots in public institutions.
In a report titled “Growing Green–the Environmental Benefits of Public Agricultural Research and Development” by Smith and Blaustein-Rejto of the Breakthrough Institute, the case is made that declining support for public research and development (R&D) funding in this country could impact the competitiveness of U.S. farmers as well as agriculture’s impact on the environment. The authors describe how R&D in this country has contributed to agricultural modernization, and how public R&D can continue to support significant climate and economic benefits that result from agriculture. A summary of the contents of this report follow.
• The USDA and land-grant and public universities have played a significant and key role in the development and improvement of U.S. agriculture enterprises. The land-grant universities (LGU’s) are also the sites of extension activities, where the results of academic research are translated for and transferred to local producers.
• The main force behind the growth in agricultural productivity in the U.S. is innovation that has been driven mainly by public research funding.
• American farming has gone through a period of massive growth in productivity over the last century (especially since WWII), and the USDA and LGU’s have been instrumental in that growth by providing the crucial infrastructure and information networks necessary for the creation and adoption of new technology.
• In the last 20 years, U.S. public spending on agricultural R&D at both the federal and state levels has fallen precipitously. Private R&D spending has greatly outpaced public R&D spending in recent times.
• In 2019, state governments funded about 21% of publicly funded agricultural R&D, while non-state and non-federal public R&D spending was about 15% of the total public spending on agricultural R&D.
• A 2018 study cited in the above-linked report found that every dollar spent on U.S. agricultural R&D generated an average $20 in benefits for consumers and the economy as a whole.
• It is widely accepted that public funding of agricultural R&D does not generate an immediate return–i.e., there is a long lag time between this funding and the realized benefits from it. Advances in science and technology build on earlier advances; thus, the developmental period for new technologies for farmers is long-term. Publicly funded agricultural research is likely the only sector that can commit to this long-term timeframe.
• One of agricultural R&D’s chief economic benefits is the role it plays in either reducing or keeping food prices low. Thus, lower rates of R&D funding and the resulting lower growth in productivity could lead to increased food prices.
• Growth in U.S. agricultural productivity has resulted in reduced land use, and subsequently less greenhouse gas emissions than would have resulted if agriculture was less productive. In other words, without the growth in crop productivity that has occurred, additional cropland would have been needed to produce the same yields from more land. Publicly funded agricultural R&D played a significant role in this increase in productivity.
• The public sector conducts applied research in areas that the private sector lacks the incentive to fund, and is also more likely to conduct research in high-risk areas that have a low chance of generating short-term profits that are often required by the private sector.
• Public sector funding of research in ancillary areas such as food safety and security and environmental impacts of agriculture should be in addition to rather than in place of productivity-related research.
• Private sector R&D spending has increased in recent decades. However, private R&D often uses the findings from public R&D research–e.g. germplasm development–to complement and support its efforts that generally are geared toward producing products for the agricultural producer market. In essence, public R&D research significantly complements and/or stimulates private research that develops the aforementioned products.
• Since agricultural production accounts for a significant percentage of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, public R&D research could provide results that contribute to a substantial reduction in these emissions. This can be done by conducting research that targets processes that emit greenhouse gases as well as by increasing crop yields so that the conversion of non-agricultural lands to farmland is reduced.
• Significantly increasing the public funding of agricultural R&D that is conducted to increase crop yields in the present era of climate change should contribute to a reduction in the risk of climate-related food shortages and food insecurity, in addition to the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and the amount of land used for farming.
• The following is a partial list of recommendations for increasing public spending on agricultural research. 1) Congress should double the funding for major agricultural R&D agencies and programs. Specifically, the authors contend that doubling ARS funding would increase the investment in its work on agricultural productivity, crop adaptation, and environmental research. 2) Double the funding for NIFA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative, which would allow researchers to conduct research aimed at improving crop yields in an era of climate change. 3) Increased federal funding of agricultural research is essential in areas of crop breeding and genetic engineering, soil carbon sequestration, and fertilizer innovations such as increased efficiency of applied fertilizers and increased use of microbial/biological soil additives. 4) The U.S. government must act to stop the decline in agricultural R&D. Its increased investment can aid in mitigating the effects of climate change, reduce the amount of land that is used for agriculture, keep U.S. farmers competitive on a global scale, and keep food prices low.
There is no doubt in this writer’s mind that publicly-funded agricultural research is the backbone of U.S. superiority in food production, and provides a positive return on investment. As stated previously, public institutions train the vast majority of today’s agricultural scientists and practitioners, as well as use public and commodity dollars to fund the research projects that are part of this training. Public institutions also use public and commodity dollars to fund high-risk research that is not advantageous for private companies to conduct. In fact, private agricultural R&D often uses results from such research conducted at public institutions to create and/or develop enhanced products for farmer use.
Increasing crop yields should be a major component of public agricultural R&D activities since maintaining and/or increasing those yields in the face of existing and new obstacles will be a challenge in coming years. The issues raised and data to support the points in the above-cited report should be seriously considered by U.S. policy makers so that public agricultural research is funded at the level that is required to provide the advanced technologies that will be needed to address the obstacles to a stable agriculture in this country.
Many of today’s agricultural scientists at public institutions must compete for research monies by applying for grants to receive funds to support their work. Click here for an article on this website that shows how this process is counterproductive for those scientists who were hired to conduct problem-solving, knowledge-creating research, and how the process of seeking competitive grant funds and servicing approved grants consumes a researcher’s valuable time. The solution is that a practicing scientist should be provided with sufficient funds from the hiring institution to conduct the research that he/she was hired to do. This means that public institutions must provide the funds that are necessary to conduct the research that is deemed important by those institutions when they made the hire.
Note: Notice that “commodity” funds are included in the above narrative when talking about “public funding” of agricultural research. Even though these commodity dollars that fund research and extension activities at the public institutions are not considered tax dollars, they are “public” dollars since they are provided to the institutions by producers of the commodity that will benefit from the funded research. Sadly, many institutions have come to rely heavily on these commodity dollars that in essence are supplanting rather than adding to public tax dollars to fund needed research. This is a limitation that must be addressed in the conversation about the need to increase public funding for agricultural research in the U.S.
Composed by Larry G. Heatherly, Oct. 2022, larryh91746@gmail.com