Historically short-shrifted by federal funding bodies, academic agricultural research was recently promised redemption: a federal funding agency of its very own that will award competitive grants in a fashion similar to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But will the new agency, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), be able to put public-sector agricultural science on an equal footing with biomedical research?

Technicians measure switchgrass, a plant studied for use as a biomass source for biofuels Image: Peggy Greb, USDA

NIFA, to be administrated by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), was modeled after the government's other large science funding agencies -- the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy, and especially the NIH. Its mission is to fund research addressing several pressing issues ranging from increasing sustainable food production to bioenergy, food safety, and global climate change while encouraging a renaissance in agricultural research at universities across the country.

Unlike university-based biomedical research, however, which in general has enjoyed robust funding in the recent past, academic agricultural research has withered under a USDA that has traditionally meted out small, non-competitive grants to land grant universities, often at the behest of US legislators trying to direct funds to their home districts or states. The result is an intellectual landscape where much of the knowledge surrounding plant science and agriculture resides not in universities but in industry, locked behind the walls of large agribusinesses.

"We're starting at a different point with NIFA than the one at which we find ourselves at NIH," said Keith Yamamoto, a University of California, San Francisco, molecular biologist who serves as an advisor to the NIH and led the agency's recent efforts to revamp its peer-review process. "The current tilt in the fundamental knowledge about plants, their growth, and development is on the industry side and I would say that it's precisely because of the lack of resources on the public side," he told The Scientist. "It's the basic, fundamental information that needs to be in the realm of the public sector."

The disparity between private and public agriculture research becomes apparent when one considers data from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Lists of recent patent holders in technology classes related to biomedicine -- surgery, drugs, prosthesis, etc. -- are replete with universities, which typically hold patents generated by publicly-funded research. Agricultural patents from 2004-2008, however, are overwhelmingly held by large agribusinesses such as Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta. In the USPTO's "Multicellular Living Organisms and Unmodified Parts Thereof and Related Processes" technology class (which includes genetically modified organisms), six companies -- Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Monsanto Technology, Stine Seed Farm, DuPont, Syngenta, and Mertec -- were awarded a total of 255 patents in 2008, while the Regents of the University of California system, which held the most patents in that technology class out of any university or university system last year, was awarded only six. Other technology classes relating to agriculture, such as "Plant Protecting and Regulating Compositions" and "Planting," have been devoid of university-held patents over the past 4-5 years.

That balance must be corrected, experts say, and NIFA may be key. "What's been missing so long in USDA is the forcing of competitive research ideas," said Martin Apple, president of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents who has been involved with the formation of NIFA since Congress created it in the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008. "The ace in the hole at NIFA is peer-reviewed research."

Rajiv Shah, USDA's undersecretary for research, education, and economics, told The Scientist that he disagreed with the premise that more knowledge is locked up in the private agriculture sector compared to the situation in biomedical science. Indeed, he said, there's plenty of hope for public-private collaborations in agriculture, but such partnerships have been relatively underutilized -- a state that the availability of NIFA funding can help change. "The USDA hadn't been using these tools of deep collaboration," Shah said. "We're going to do all these things very differently. We are going to engage the private sector much more than we have in the past." But Shah stopped short of revealing specific strategies for how to spark such collaboration.

"Monsanto scientists typically do not apply for research grants from government agencies, but collaborate with hundreds of academic scientists whose research is supported by federal funding," David Fischhoff, Monsanto's technology and strategy development lead, wrote in an email to The Scientist. "We see the formation of NIFA as a positive development for science, agriculture and farmers." The private sector seems to recognize the benefit of NIFA, but it's unclear whether the new pool of money will encourage big ag companies to increase their level of collaboration with academic researchers -- a strategy that Big Pharma tends to employ more vigorously. Large agriculture companies do not typically apply for USDA funding directly, in part "because of the proprietary rights problems that make it difficult to accept the terms of a federal grant," said Robin Schoen, director of the National Academies of Science's Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Roger Beachy, NIFA's new director, added that engaging the private sector in publicly funded research consortia will take time and tact. "I know that there's a degree of trust that can be built while still maintaining intellectual property and the segregation necessary," he said at NIFA's official launch on Oct 8.

The agency's budget of more than $1 billion is a good first step towards achieving its goals, said Apple. "If NIFA puts a billion dollars into the university system, it's going to have a huge impact," he said. That amount, though a huge step forward in competitive granting by the USDA, is comparable to the R&D budget of just one of the agribusiness giants -- Monsanto spent $980 million on R&D in FY2008 -- and is dwarfed by the annual budgets of NIH ($30.5 billion in 2009) and NSF ($6.9 billion in 2009).

Even with all of the challenges that lie ahead for NIFA, Yamamoto agreed that the agency is a promising prospect for expanding the reach of agricultural research. If NIFA "can move in a way that establishes some public/private collaboration such that some of the information locked up in the private side can be shared," he said, "I would congratulate them and maybe that can establish a model that we could take advantage of on the health side."


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A USDA basic science institute?
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