We caught up with Keith Fuglie, who is with the resource and rural economics division of the Economic Research Service at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to hear more about his efforts in analyzing agricultural funding and changing priorities.
He published his work in the journal of Global Food Security.
His research examines the interaction between public and private sector funding in the field of agriculture.
“Generally we see the public and private sector playing complementary roles,” he said. Private sector spending tends to focus on more downstream efforts that can be commercialized, he added.
“The public sector [researchers], they’re the leading sector advancing the scientific frontier,” he said. “[They make the] major new discoveries that will make major advancements possible in the future particularly as we face challenges from climate change and other issues from natural resource degradation, and soil and water conservation, as well as major advances in crop genetics or livestock genetics.”
Many of those types of discoveries start with work in public labs, and then are further developed for commercial use by the private sector, said Fuglie. “The public [research] is more long term it’s valuable for society, but the commercial return to it is low – it’s long term, [and] it’s high risk,” he added.
Agriculture’s success story
The ongoing effort to track how much funding is being spent and in what areas is one way to focus on efforts to make agriculture more productive, said Fuglie.
“What we see is what has allowed agricultural supply to grow in the face of limited land and water resources,” he said. “What has allowed it to grow has been the research and development.”
The demand for food is only going to increase, particularly as low income countries become middle income countries and look for additional forms of protein, he said. “That puts a lot of demand on agriculture and productivity to meet those demands – and where will the research come from to meet that?”
The complementary work of public and private sector research will be needed to meet the needs of the increasing population, said Fuglie.
Funding spending
Research spending from the private sector covering areas including crop research, animal production and farm machinery has been increasing, said Fuglie. “The private sector has really increased its role in research and development in agriculture especially in crops and seeds,” he added.
Global spending from the private sector for agricultural research and development increased from $5.1bn in 1990 to $15.6bn by 2014, he said in the paper. In developed countries, private sector funding has outpaced public.
Previously, many companies have focused on similar parts of the world with their research efforts, but, a shift toward developing products for emerging markets is happening, he said. “That comes out pretty strongly in the data,” he added.
“They are increasingly targeting research and development investments to those markets,” he said. “They have to use different breeding pools, eventually perhaps different biotech traits, depending on needs for those regions. Some of the tropical regions may be facing more significant heat stress or drought stress, but we definitely see the big companies going global.”
Nutrition sector focuses
Work on animal feed and nutrition comprises a portion of the funding spent on animal sector research, along with animal health and animal genetics, said Fuglie.
However, animal feed in bulk has not generated the supportive funding when compared to specialty feeds or additives, he said. “There are certain classes of feed that are research and development intensive,” he added.
“There’s a number of companies that have a fairly significant research and development on those specialty feed additives,” he said. “That’s one component that is quite important.”
Funding surprises
There also were several surprises within the data analyzed, said Fuglie. One is that venture capital investment for agricultural technology research and development has exploded.
“A lot centers around precision agriculture [or] real time advisor services to maximize their yield and continuous monitoring on crop condition,” he said. “A lot of new companies are coming to play in this area – it’s interesting to see that a lot of the companies see a potential for widespread use of those kind of technologies.”
Additionally, the use of biologicals, like soil microbes, has been gaining interest, he said. Work has been ongoing for some time, but more commercial development has started.
“Biological inputs could be a whole new class that wasn’t available in the past,” he said.