The secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, promised on Thursday an aggressive plan for boosting federal spending on farm-related research, cheering up public colleges that expect to be the chief beneficiaries.
The program features a new National Institute of Food and Agriculture, approved last year by Congress, with a budget just over $1.3-billion. Mr. Vilsack said the new institute would offer grants and seek to bring farm research on a par organizationally with research financed by agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
The federal government typically has spent about $2.6-billion a year on agricultural research, well below the NIH’s $30-billion and the NSF’s $6-billion for their research programs. Much of the research money handed out by the Agriculture Department is given to states and local partners, bypassing universities. Some critics have charged that the money has not gone to support the best science.
But Mr. Vilsack, in his address here Thursday, said the new institute, or NIFA, would direct more of its money to qualified researchers. The Agriculture Department has distributed between $120-million and $180-million in competitive research grants in recent years, and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities said it expects that share could now grow to around $250-million.
The secretary outlined a series of reasons why the shift was necessary, starting with estimates that global food production must double by 2050 to keep up with population growth. That productivity increase must happen at a time when the world is facing the prospect of lower crop yields due to climate change and when people have growing concerns about the safety of the food supply.
“USDA science needs to change to respond to these pressures,” Mr. Vilsack said.
House and Senate lawmakers took a step in that direction last week by reaching agreement on a budget of $1.36-billion for NIFA in the federal fiscal year that began this month, an increase of nearly 10 percent over the department’s spending for such activities in fiscal 2009.
The greater federal commitment to farm research was long sought by public colleges, said Ian L. Maw, vice president for food, agriculture, and natural resources at the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, which represents more than 200 institutions.
The creation of NIFA and the increased budget approved last week is “a major signal to all of us that the administration and Congress are very serious about pumping more research dollars into agriculture and its related sciences,” Mr. Maw said.
The administration also has appointed Rajiv J. Shah, who led the agricultural-development program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to serve as the Agriculture Department’s first “chief scientist,” and Roger N. Beachy, founding president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, to serve as the first director of NIFA.
Along with creating NIFA, Congress called for a greater share of agricultural research money to be distributed through competitive research grants, increasing the likelihood that a higher proportion will flow to universities, Mr. Maw said.
The changes are expected to bring a much-needed level of seriousness to the Agriculture Department and its approach to research, said Alan I. Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The choice of Mr. Beachy to head NIFA is a strong signal in that direction, Mr. Leshner said, as he is “a very serious scientist with superb credentials.”
“It is a transformation in the approach,” Mr. Leshner said. “The USDA has not always done the most rigorous science.”
