Ag Extension, NIFA, the Farm Bill, and You

I recently found out an old acquaintance was appointed to head a major federal agency. Cool! Except...I didn't know much about The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). So, I gave him a call and barraged him with questions about his new gig.

NIFA was created in the 2008 Farm Bill as a new name for the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES), part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The Cooperative Extension Service is a national network of education professionals located in each state. They are charged with providing research-based information and advice to agricultural producers, small business owners, kids and parents, and consumers.

The information is customized for each state and region, and it's free. Instead of relying on Google or for-profit companies, you can find specific, research-based information from Extension. Get authoritative answers to questions about food, nutrition, spiders, money management, and more by adding “Extension” to your online search. Or, call your local Extension office with your question.

The Extension Service is an incredible national public resource, and most of the people I talk to have never heard of it.

Abraham Lincoln created the system in 1862 with "land-grants"of 30,000 acres to each state for an agricultural college. In 1914, the system was expanded to share funding and priority-setting between federal, state and local governments.

The basic idea hasn’t changed in 100 years. Extension translates science research so it is useful and understandable to the public, and relays public concerns and emerging issues back to academics to direct new research. NIFA doesn't perform actual research and education, but funds it at the state and local level through the Land-Grant State Extension system, and provides program leadership.

In my chat with Director Ramaswamy, one of my first questions was about the quote from him above. Why are Extension resources such a secret? His answer, in part:

"Go to any state — ask how the state college football team did, and people will know exactly what happened in detail down to the players and the scores of the last game. But if you ask 'What’s the greatest thing that was discovered at your Land-Grant University?', they usually don’t know. Most of them don’t know what a Land-Grant University is!”

“In the US, food is taken for granted. We have tremendous food security here in the US. Less than 6% of our income is spent on food, one of the lowest percentages in the world. Eighty percent of the US population is urban, and that continues to shift away from rural. People don't know where their food comes from anymore. It's out of sight, out of mind."

NIFA funds programs addressing urban food insecurity and improving nutritional choices. Want to store breast milk safely? Need help managing your money? Extension has programs for that. 4-H has expanded past "cows and plows" into urban areas and science and technology. NIFA supports the Extension Disaster Education Network, which had "boots on the ground before and after Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy," according to Ramaswamy.

It would seem like everyone, including me, ought to know what NIFA is. The problem, says Ramaswamy, is "signal to noise." There are so many competing sources of information available, an agency with a modest budget and not much advertising finds it hard to compete.

How modest is the budget? The part of the 2013 Farm Bill that would fund NIFA through 2018 is actually pretty tiny, comparatively speaking. The entire Farm Bill is roughly 1% of the federal budget. Of that, 80% of the Farm Bill funds nutrition assistance (SNAP, more commonly known as food stamps). There are lots of other things in the Farm Bill as well: reshaping dairy and commodity price supports; crop insurance, and funding for the rest of USDA and NRCS.

USDA programs, and NIFA in particular, are critical to states and states' economic development. The 2013 Farm Bill in Congress right now follows a federal shutdown and years of sequestration and cuts that have left the US science community reeling.

Earlier this month, The Association of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU) released the grim results of a survey on the budget sequestration’s impact on research. Land-Grant Universities are tied to state budgets and to NIFA/Extension grants for a portion of their funding.

The message of APLU was clear: “Sequestration is a blunt and reckless tool that has chipped away at the core role our institutions play in conducting critical research." You can read the full report here; two highlights I want to mention:

• __Fifty-eight percent of respondents cited personnel impacts at their institutions as a result of sequester. __This included position reductions (50%) as well as layoffs (24%).
• Eighty-one percent of respondents cited impacts directly affecting their research activity. These ranged from reduction in the number of federal grants and delayed research projects to the inability to purchase research equipment or instrumentation (28%) and cancelled (19%) or delayed (38%) field or experimental work.

If Congress fails to reach agreement on the current Farm Bill by Dec. 13, 2013, it will be kicked over into a third year of debate. Congress failed to renew the Farm Bill in 2012, providing a one-year extension in which several NIFA programs were cut by $130 million. NIFA also lost $60 million due to sequestration.

There are certainly meaningful arguments to be had about the Federal budget, and the role of agricultural spending in that budget, but I suspect that they are not happening in Congress at the moment. Cutting the budgets of NIFA, USDA, NSF, or other agencies that drive basic research and protect natural resources is a bit like trying to recover space on a 50 terabyte drive by deleting all your .txt files. It might make you feel better, but it won't solve any long-term problems.

There has to be a better way to fund this core part of our research and education infrastructure.