Page 123 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

At North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University scientists used AFRI funds to help
remove 98 percent of the allergens in peanuts. The school has patented the process and licensed
it to companies that are working on getting the peanuts onto the market.

Recombinetics Inc., based in St. Paul, Minnesota, used $435,000 of AFRI grant money to breed
cattle without horns through gene editing. De-horning cattle is must for the dairy industry in
order to prevent the animals from injuring each other, but the process is time consuming,
expensive and, for the cattle, unpleasant.

Researchers have bred cattle conventionally without horns in the past, but a side effect was they
produced lower-quality milk. The gene-edited cattle don’t have that problem.

And at Texas A&M University, AFRI funds went into studying the genomes of thousands of
beef and dairy cattle from New Mexico, Colorado, California, Washington and Texas.
Researchers were looking for genetic variants associated with the susceptibility to bovine
respiratory disease. Christopher Seabury, one of the project scientists, said they were successful.

Using their results, Seabury predicted that ranches and dairies will be able to significantly keep
the disease out of future herds, saving the industry billions of dollars.

But he also stressed that the funding is just not there for many scientists with projects just as
valuable as his.
Seabury, who spoke at a recent briefing for Capitol Hill staffers, said he serves on five separate
panels that choose grant recipients from the hundreds of proposals that are submitted.

Under a typical panel, he said, there may be up to 250 applicants that have to be judged. Of those
250, there are usually 25 to 45 proposals that are deemed “outstanding” and given high priority.
But only between eight and 12 are actually funded, Seabury said.

“We’re actually rate-limiting ourselves in terms of the amount of agricultural progress and
food security that we could have in the United States in terms of sustainable agriculture by
not investing in our future,” he told the Hill staffers.
NIFA’s Ramaswamy gave Agri-Pulse a higher estimate of grant approvals – he said an average
of one in 10 is approved – but still called it an “incredibly tough” rate.

Grumbly went further: “AFRI has left over $3 billion worth of research that was rated as
excellent on the table in the last three years,” he said. “That’s unconscionable in this day and age
and represents a huge opportunity cost for our society.”

Gary Felton, head of the Entomology Department at Penn State University and another of the
visiting scientists who took part in the Hill briefing, called it a sad situation.
“The quality of the applications in the U.S. is still very high, but we just haven’t had the dollars
to fund the research,” Felton said in a report distributed to staffers. “In many cases, we don’t
know what we are missing.”

The problem is so bad, Seabury said, that foreign governments are trying to poach our scientists
and their research.

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