Efforts to establish an agency in USDA to invest in high-risk, high-reward research got a boost at a hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday.
Despite being authorized in the 2018 Farm Bill, AgARDA, the Agriculture Advanced Research and Development Authority, has never received enough funding to be created. The AgARDA concept is modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E), which are aimed at developing breakthrough technologies.
“We're excited about the potential of the program,” USDA's undersecretary for research, education and economics, Chavonda Jacobs-Young, told the House Ag Committee's Conservation, Research, and Biotechnology Subcommittee.
But she said, “We recognize that resources are going to be needed to be successful,” in response to questions from the subcommittee’s senior Democrat, Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who said AgARDA has "tremendous potential."
"It will give us the space to be able to take those (research) risks, and still be responsive to the stakeholders who depend on us to do a lot of the work that we do every day," Jacobs-Young said.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House and Senate are proposing to double AgARDA's funding authorization to $100 million a year in the next farm bill. The 2018 farm bill authorized $50 million a year, but to date AgARDA has received only $2 million, Jacobs-Young said.
Jacobs-Young, Spanberger and subcommittee Chairman Jim Baird, R-Ind., all cited a 2022 Economic Research Service report that found every dollar spent on public ag research between 1900 and 2011 yielded $20 in benefits to the U.S. economy.
But that report also found that, as Jacobs-Young and some members noted, public ag research spending has been going down
“In 2019 (the last year for which complete statistics are available), public agricultural R&D spending in the United States totaled $5.16 billion, about a third lower than the peak in 2002 when spending was $7.64 billion (in constant 2019 dollars),” the report said. “At the same time, other countries have maintained or increased their spending on agricultural R&D.”
Don’t miss a beat! It’s easy to sign up for a FREE month of Agri-Pulse news! For the latest on what’s happening in Washington, D.C. and around the country in agriculture, just click here.
That includes China, which the report said “has become the largest funder of agricultural R&D in the world, surpassing the United States and the European Union.”
Jacobs-Young, who also serves as USDA’s chief scientist, said the Agricultural Research Service has about $1 billion in deferred maintenance. “We cannot keep up with deferred maintenance, and that story is the same in the land-grant university system,” she said, echoing comments from a panel at the March 22 Agri-Pulse Food & Policy Summit.
The hearing was held as a wide range of groups across the country are calling on Congress to sharply increase the amount of money for ag research. In a March 6 letter to the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees, the groups called for $8 billion in mandatory ag research funding in the farm bill.
Jacobs-Young echoed many of the points she made at a Senate Ag Committee hearing in December.
For more news, go to www.Agri-Pulse.com.
