Page 117 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

“In 2011, USDA awarded our largest-ever competitive research grant to the Northwest
Advanced Renewables Alliance, betting on the promise that cellulose-rich, discarded wood
products could be a viable renewable fuel source instead of going to waste,” Vilsack said in a
statement released after the plane landed. “Today, we are able to celebrate the results of that
investment, which is a major advancement for clean alternatives to conventional fossil fuels.”

The House version of the 2008
farm bill tried to protect $200
million in mandatory funding for
AFRI, but it didn’t survive the
conference committee. Still, AFRI
has managed to prosper. Funding
for the combined competitive grant
program – the program that the
research sector hoped would help
propel agricultural research the way
that medical research blossomed at
the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) – has gotten incremental
increases over the years, rising
from an initial $190 million to its
current level of about $350 million.

It’s a substantial increase, so long as you don’t compare it to the meteoric rise of research under
NIH. In the mid-1970s, the government spent about $1 billion on both agriculture and medical
research, Ramaswamy says. Today the NIH gets about $30 billion per year and more than 80
percent of it goes to pay the salaries of more than 300,000 scientists at about 2,500 universities
and other institutions across the country.

In 1970’s, SoAR’s Grumbly said, $1 out of every $6 of total federal research money went to
agriculture science. Today that ratio is about $1 out of every $30.

Pharmaceutical companies banded together in the 1980’s to form Research America, a group that
better enabled them to lobby successfully for massive increases in spending on medical research.

While SoAR – effectively the agricultural version of Research America – is lobbying hard and in
the midst of yet another campaign to drum up support, medical science may always have the
edge on Capitol Hill and with the public. That’s perhaps the fault of our farmers and ranchers for
keeping the country so well-fed -whereas most people have been impacted by cancer or other
diseases that we all wish there was a cure for, not many know someone who has starved to death.

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