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Making alternative agriculture research policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2009

Katherine Reichelderfer Smith
Katherine Reichelderfer Smith
Affiliation:
Director of the Policy Studies Program, Henry A. Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture, 9200 Edmonston Road, Suite 117, Greenbelt, MD 20770-1551.
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Abstract

The policies influencing the American agricultural research agenda are developed by Congress, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the 58 state agricultural experiment stations of the land-grant university system, with input from various advisory groups. Despite the slow pace of change in the agricultural research agenda, there are no special barriers keeping the research system from adapting to contemporary and alternative agriculture issues. Rather, agricultural researchers have neither appropriate professional incentives nor sufficient financial incentives to shift toward alternative agriculture. Public intervention to alter these incentives has been thwarted because agricultural research institutions set their agendas through obscure processes. Five areas of policy change that could improve the prospects for evolution of a significant alternative agriculture research agenda are: 1) imposing a means test for formula fund payment limitations to states, with saved funds directed toward alternative agriculture research; 2) making priority setting a condition for receiving federalfunds for agricultural research to make the research agenda-setting process clearer to all interested parties; 3) requiring that federally funded research programs be categorized by the specific social goals toward which they are directed, to aid in judgments about the relevance of specific public agricultural research programs; 4) requiring information on research programs to be reported in a way that is specifically relevant to the alternative agriculture agenda; 5) formally involving public citizens and farmers in reviewing agricultural research grants to assure that the usefulness of proposed research is weighed along with scientific merit. These proposals complement current interest in making science generally more responsive to national priorities, and are entirely feasible within current agricultural research policy processes. Their effectiveness, however, is limited by the shrinking influence of federal funding in the state agricultural experiment station system, and they are only incremental changes within the existing system rather than radical reforms toward an alternative research system.

Keywords

agricultural researchcompetitive grantsCurrent Research Information Systemformula fundingpeer reviewresearch policyscience policystate agricultural experiment stations
Type
Forum on Alternative Agriculture Research Policy
Information
American Journal of Alternative Agriculture , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 1995 , pp. 10 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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