Page 114 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

Conaway will be helping
write the next farm bill, but
he won’t be doing it alone,
and the priority of Congress
has always focused first and
foremost on the safety net
programs for America’s
farmers in Title I – not
intangible promises of future
cures and breakthroughs in
Title VII, which deals with
research.

But the future is closer than it
seems as new plant and
animal diseases present
bigger and bigger threats, and
that’s pushing researchers
harder than ever to get a
single message to Congress in the lead-up to the 2018 farm bill: Better science and innovative
policies are needed if farmers are going to be able to continue to feed the world.

It’s not a new message, but it’s becoming more urgent as the amount of arable land remains
constant or shrinks and the world’s population continues to grow.

Ironically, government funding for agriculture research continued to slide downward over the
past 40 years as demand increased for farmers to produce more while using sustainable methods.
In the early 1970s, about 6 and a half percent of federal research dollars went to
agriculture science, according to Grumbly. That level is now down to just 3 percent.

It’s the primary reason behind SoAR’s latest all-out effort to get Congress to act. The group
wants more money for researchers – a lot more money – but perhaps more importantly, it is
advocating for a shakeup at USDA and a new structure for the way that federal programs are run.

This was the same message that lawmakers were getting from the research community more than
a decade ago as the process to create the 2008 farm bill was in full swing. Demands for a new
way of managing research were escalating and thousands of individual requests for increased
research funding were pouring into the Senate and House Agriculture committees.

AFRI is born, providing new hope for the future

Sitting in his Longworth Building office on Capitol Hill, House staffer John Goldberg was
feeling the pressure. Just a couple years earlier, in 2004, the USDA Research, Education and
Economics Task Force, under the guidance of the esteemed plant biologist and medical doctor
William Danforth, had submitted to Congress its report supporting the creation of the National
Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

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