Page 116 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

Just last year, Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, hailed the grant
program as America’s best chance to combat avian influenza, the virus that forced farmers to
destroy 48 million chickens and turkeys in 2015.

“We need a more effective and modern way of ending these outbreaks,” Duvall said in an
op-ed published by The Hill last April. “Scientists at Ohio State and the University of Cincinnati
are answering this challenge by analyzing the flu virus and how it jumps from poultry to people
to pigs. This collaboration, funded by the NIFA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative
(AFRI), is one of many exploring new ways to better identify and control future outbreaks.”
NIFA director Sonny Ramaswamy sat down with Agri-Pulse
to talk about the program – its successes as well as
shortcomings that have stood in the way of allowing it to
shine even brighter.

“The vision articulated in creating NIFA and AFRI was not
to use small amounts of money for evolutionary increases in
knowledge, but truly revolutionary, transformative increases
in knowledge,” said Ramaswamy.

AFRI, he said, has been drawing on the excitement to
innovate from the private sector, the academic sector and the
government sector, he said, and the results have often been
astonishing.

For example, when an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 touched
down at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14, 2016, then-USDA Secretary
Tom Vilsack was proudly waiting for it. That’s because the jet fuel used to power the cross-
country trip from Seattle, had been partially made from wood chips, and the science used to
make that happen had been partially funded by a $40 million AFRI grant.
114 www.Agri-Pulse.com