I’m back from the first day of the USA Science and Engineering Festival‘s Final Expo. All signs suggest attendance will likely break the 500,000 estimated from the first festival back in 2010. And I have found it, on balance, to be an improvement in terms of number and breadth of participants and topics. The biggest plus for me over last year was a notable increase in the number of visitors building and doing things. You could learn how to solder! (That’s not just for high-tech stuff, thank you very much.)
(Seriously, if you’re going tomorrow, and want to see anything at the stages, showing up early can only help. Both the MythBusters and Bill Nye filled their stage areas to more than overcapacity.)
One of those topics at the Festival that got me thinking was agriculture. The ag-related exhibits I noticed where from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and the 4-H (which is administered by NIFA). They serve as excellent reminders of how science and technology at the federal level extend beyond the usual suspects of the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, NASA, and the Department of Defense.
What doesn’t appear to extend past those usual suspects (all of these big dogs of science funding are mid-to-late 20th-century creations) is support for research dollars (or agricultural research at all). ScienceInsider recently noted, amongst its mixed messages about federal research funding, that research dollars are a pitiful amount of the total agriculture budget. This would include not only research in improving agriculture (yield, sustainability, disease and/or insect resistance), but also in food safety. Maybe the U.S. does this better than most other countries in the world, but the latest mad cow outbreak suggests we’re as much lucky as good at it.
The current farm bill addresses over $280 billion in spending over five years. In that bill $348 million covers research over five years. Put another way, research is roughly one to two-tenths of a percent of total federal agricultural spending. The U.S. spends about 2.8 percent of its gross national product on research and development.
To say we’re doing this on the cheap seems an understatement. And, outside of a few small advocacy groups in Washington, nobody seems to give a damn. There is discussion about developing a foundation to help endow agricultural research, with matching funds of $100 million attached. This isn’t unprecedented. While the National Science Foundation is not a foundation in the same sense, the National Institutes of Health have a foundation.
So, to borrow from Bill Maher – new rule. If you are talking about science and technology policy – who are you including? Who are you leaving out? At a minimum, don’t forget agriculture. You’d be one of the few who haven’t.
Pasco Phronesis 