Supporters of Agricultural Research (SoAR), an advocacy group, is campaigning for additional federal funding to support feed and agricultural research in the US, said Tom Fink director of research and policy analysis with SoAr.
The non-profit organization published details of its first project aimed at highlighting a range of work being done to address current challenges in agricultural production and has since taken several of the researchers featured to address the US Congress.
“The need is there,” Fink told FeedNavigator. “We’re being out paced by China. We’re no longer number one in that area of public research spending and we’re seeing declines in agricultural output.”
The fields of farming and animal feed are ones that has not got much attention in recent years, he said. One reason for that may be that the US has not faced some of the supply challenges other countries have seen, but that could change if work to address current and ongoing challenges isn’t done.
The world is expected to see an increase to about 9bn people by 2050 and steps need to be taken now to give producers the tools to feed that many people, he said. “What’s lost in this is the sense of emergency,” he added.
Agricultural advocacy
The federal government has a unique role to play in providing funding for foundational agricultural science research, said Fink. Projects like those that address soil erosion in feed crop fields serve a “broader public good,” he added.
The foundation supports the federal Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) grant program, he said. However it was supposed to have a budget of about $700m but since it started, it has only received funding for about half that amount, said Fink.
Private industry also plays an important role in research, but it tends to be further down the line, when a feed or treatment is closer to direct application, said Fink.
To promote the current research being done in the feed, or wider agricultural sector the group has partnered with multiple colleges and universities along with farmers, scientists and other stakeholders and is sharing details about some of the work being done in research projects across the country, said Fink. “It’s about telling that story – pointing to those challenges,” he added.
“Part of our role is to make agricultural research more sexy and more relatable, and part of the effort is to get more young people involved,” he said.
“There’s a lot of really good research that’s going on that’s limited because of a lack of funds,” said researcher Jason Woodworth research associate professor in the department of animal sciences and industry with Kansas State University (KSU). The KSU academic, as part of the SoAR campaign, went to Washington DC to address lawmakers about the research being done and the need for continued funding.
“To me the biggest thing is advocating and increasing awareness – on the Hill [with Congress] and with consumers,” Woodworth told us. Older or bigger-named researchers may have less of a challenge finding funding, it doesn’t mean that a more obscure researcher has less exciting ideas, he added.
That type of foundational funding if often the factor that enables interested students to carry out graduate-level research in feed or an agricultural field, he said.
“In the short term, this will increase the numbers of students in these agricultural and scientific fields,” he said. “In the long term, that [federal] funding is what is needed to help create and sustain a program [and] to train future decision makers.”
Research work
One project recently highlighted by SoAR was research done at KSU aiming to understand the role feed played in the recent outbreak of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus (PEDv).
That research, which was funded by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Pork Board and Kansas State confirmed how the disease was transmitted in feed and sought ways to eliminate or prevent contamination, said Woodworth. He worked on the project with the university’s applied swine nutrition team.
The group was able to establish details about how the disease spread in feed, including a minimum infection dose, he said. "We discovered that it was a very, very small amount of [the] virus that could lead to disease – that really put in perspective how easy it was to transmit the virus,” he added.
The group has also explored methods like pelleting and heat treatment to kill the virus when it is present in swine feed, he said. Currently. the team is examining the use of feed additives like medium-chain fatty acids or treatments like formaldehyde in control of PEDv.
The research team also is looking at the wider issue of biosecurity and how to prevent trans-boundary diseases from finding ways to enter the US, said Woodworth.
“What we want to do, and what the industry should do is invest in looking at ways to prevent [problems],” he said. “It allows us to act quickly and have the information available before it gets to be a significant issue and that’s where the agency funding comes in.”