Plant Science Job Horizon Dimmed By Lack Of Funding

Researchers are perturbed by the weak support being given to a discipline that they consider vital to planet Earth's survival The job market for agricultural scientists has shown little or no net growth over the past several years. Fortunately, in a sense, the same weak economic climate that's slowed job creation has also slowed the flow of students through the agricultural science departments, say university officials nationwide. Thus, the production of Ph.D.'s today generally matches the number of jobs available for most graduates, even in a period when few new positions are being created. But while the current downturn in the quantity of graduates may suit today's weak employment picture, it may damage the field in the long run, some agricultural scientists say. These researchers project a possible shortage of qualified agricultural scientists if the economy strengthens during the coming decade. Warren Wessels, assistant dean of the College of Agriculture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, sounds the same note as other U.S. agricultural scientists when he describes the current job market as "pretty flat." Teaching opportunities are especially narrow, Wessels says, "because the universities have been hard hit by the economy. People in the food sciences and some people in plant sciences have new industry opportunities--in plant biotech, for example. But that's not a booming market, either. Companies seem to be holding back on hiring till they see what happens with the economy." Most agricultural scientists are employed by universities and state and federal agricultural research centers, but others hold a vari- ety of positions in government and industry. That includes researchers in plant and animal breeding and genetics, plant disease, and animal nutrition and health who work in the seed and feed industries, for plant breeders, and in biotech companies. Natural resources investigators work as environmental consultants and in soil, water, land, and wildlife management divisions of state governments and the federal government. Still other agricultural scientists are human nutrition and agricultural-product processing experts employed by food companies, agriculture experts doing economic analysis for government agencies and the financial industry, and researchers investigating industrial and pharmaceutical uses of farm products. Agricultural scientists point to drastic cuts in state and university budgets, industry restructuring, and a flat federal research budget for agriculture over the past decade as root causes for the slowed production of new jobs. "In some disciplines--agricultural engineering, for instance--there's been a slowdown, a hiatus that's likely to stay in place for the next two or three years," says Dwayne Suter, an agricultural engineer who is associate dean for instruction in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Texas A&M University in College Station. "Positions have been cut in universities," Suter says. "And part of the restructuring of American business is slowing down training programs for new hires and cutting employee positions, particularly in areas like R&D. What we're hearing from our placement center is that fewer and fewer [industry] people are coming to interview [students]. And some companies are coming to us and other universities, looking to farm out their research work." Though the job market for the agricultural sciences may be slow, there's been a surge of growth in new research areas for agricultural scientists, observers of the field say. But some warn that those new areas of study are unlikely to produce many jobs in the near future, especially without some fundamental changes in the nation's agricultural research infrastructure to emphasize more cooperative efforts and a quicker transfer of research to application. Interdisciplinary studies, whole-systems research, agricultural knowledge used as a tool in other research fields, and an increase in the use of advanced technology in agriculture are all part of the new age of research in agriculture, scientists say. "There's been a paradigm shift to more broad-based research questions," says Dwayne Suter, an agricultural engineer and associate dean for instruction in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Texas A&M University in College Station. "Questions that require interdisciplinary cooperation are the ones being funded today," he says, citing areas such as bioremediation of waste products, in which an agricultural engineer and an expert on a particular fungus may form a team along with biochemists and microbiologists as an example of such research. "More and more, labs are pursuing cross-disciplinary research--trying to go after broader answers," says Bruce Schwartz, a spokesman for the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Md. "Agriculture research is looking beyond its traditional questions like `Can we breed a new crop?' to less traditional issues, such as `How will the nutrients in that crop affect human health? Can we increase the nutrient value? How can we produce the food faster, cleaner, more safely?' " Besides pursuing more issues related to food safety and quality, human nutrition, diet, and health, Schwartz says a large proportion of today's agriculture research goes beyond the assumption that food crops simply produce food. "A large amount of current research is centered on examining the nonfood potential of farm crops, such as biologically based fuels, plastic, medicines, pesticides, and waste-remediation products. There's also an emphasis on developing nonpolluting technologies for agriculture and the food-processing industry," Schwartz says. Other new research involves developing computers, electronic sensing devices, and knowledge-based systems for use in agriculture, food-processing, and ecosystem and natural resource management, says Suter. He cites such examples as the use of sonar to determine backfat content in cattle and knowledge-based computer systems that can coordinate large amounts of data and thus aid in managing large ecosystems, such as cattle ranges. However, many researchers caution against seeing booming new research areas as a near-term source of new science jobs. Robert Todd, assistant dean for research of Pennsylvania State University's College of Agriculture in University Park, says his own field of soil microbiology is an example. New emphasis on the environment and on whole-systems studies has created a research boom in that field, says Todd: "There's been increased encouragement for agricultural scientists to take these new approaches, such as taking a systems analysis approach and analyzing all aspects of inputs and outputs in an ecosystem--plants, animals, and so on." But, Todd says, "increased support for a branch of research is not the same as new jobs." In fact, some scientists contend that the U.S. agricultural research system needs an overhaul in order to make new, more complex, more technologically based agriculture research a part of the economy. "Research into areas like bio-based pesticides has many component parts. Small companies and labs aren't equipped to do the experiments. The USDA might perform a useful role by helping integrate skills among small organizations, serving as a central source of information, and conducting evaluative studies of the multiple strategies different companies might develop," says agricultural consultant Richard Herrett. "That, along with better integrating agricultural research activities with extension services to make a quicker transition between research and its use, would help bring today's complex, interdisciplinary research into the marketplace. "Our current agriculture research system was created in the '20s. We can't use it to cope with the 21st century." --M.C. Weak federal support for agriculture research has also contributed to slowing the field's growth, contends Richard Herrett, an agricultural consultant who heads Envirag Associates in Bethesda, Md. "If you discount for inflation, it [the federal agricultural research budget] has remained flat for 10 years, maybe longer. That static budget is appalling when so many have shown that investment in agricultural research returns manyfold to the system. And it certainly impacts on support for the work from other sources." The biotechnology industry has been a significant new source of jobs for agricultural researchers over the past decade. But slow economic times, public controversy surrounding some agricultural biotech products, and the movement of many older companies out of the pure research phase and into later phases of development and production currently make the biotech sector a less fertile job market than many would hope. Biotech companies moving into new agricultural product lines do need traditional agricultural scientists as well as the molecular biologists who traditionally make up the bulk of their research staffs, says Robert Collier, senior fellow and dairy research director in the animal sciences division of the Monsanto Agricultural Group of Monsanto Co. in St. Louis. "Once you have a group of molecular biologists on board, they're very flexible--able to move from project to project, and also from company to company," Collier says. "But what's still missing in each research group is the specialist for the particular plant or disease or whatever that's the investigation's target." But such jobs for agricultural scientists are relatively scarce in today's companies, Collier says: "Human health care research is moving faster than plant science, and so offers more positions. And plant science is moving faster than animal science, because it's easier to develop products with plants than with animals and because controversy over products [such as bovine growth hormone] has made the animal science field move more slowly than we'd like. "Furthermore, there's not as much basic science hiring in biotech as there was a few years ago, except at the newer startups. The older companies are moving on into more processing work and methods for production and quality control." Although jobs for agricultural specialists are in short supply, Collier calls them among the most rewarding jobs in the biotech industry. "Molecular biologists have more flexibility in where they go, but their work is relatively redundant," he says. "For those who want to be in the driver's seat, being the topic expert on a research team is the most exciting." Texas A&M, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., are the three largest graduate schools for agricultural science in the U.S. Together, their graduate student population totals nearly 3,600, with most intending to pursue doctoral degrees, according to Suter. While plant science funding may not be as abundant as many would like, it is still a field undergoing a revolution. "The hot field is very definitely the new techniques of molecular biology. It's the absolutely dominating technique of plant biology these days," says Paul Stumpf, formerly a chief scientist at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and now an emeritus professor at the University of California, Davis. Molecular biology goes much further than producing tomatoes more appealing than the tasteless red orbs found in many grocery stores. "There's a lot of talk about new uses of agriculture," says Richard Burgess, director of the University of Wisconsin Biotechnology Center. While bovine somatotrophin, a hormone that boosts a cow's milk output, is now readily available in a bioengin-eered form, Burgess asks, what good is increased dairy output in a country where milk is already in surplus? The challenge, he says, is to take the existing high productivity in agriculture and turn it toward new products. Burgess says research is under way at Wisconsin to convert an abundant but relatively low-value crop, alfalfa, into an "enzyme factory." The idea is to insert genes into alfalfa to produce enzymes of commercial value, much as E. coli bacteria are currently used to produce valuable proteins. The economic potential for such a crop is tremendous, with alfalfa hay generating $300 per acre and enzymes having the potential to generate $5,000 per acre, he says. "Whether enzyme farming becomes a really hot area depends on how well this project goes," he says. The advantage of alfalfa is that it grows well in many parts of the U.S. and requires no external source of nitrogen. The challenge is to find the right genes, insert them, and then extract the proteins efficiently, he says, adding that numerous chemicals can be produced in this way, such as biodegradable plastics. A related burgeoning field is phytopharmaceuticals, that is, growing plants or plant cell cultures for drug production. For instance, ESCAgenetics Corp. in San Carlos, Calif., will be using plant cell cultures to produce tax-ol, a promising anticancer drug. Sustainable agriculture is a growing theme and involves developing methods of farming that require fewer pesticides and fertilizers. One alternative to pesticides is to spray a field with insect-attacking viruses, but a limiting factor is the expense involved in producing the pathogens in live insects. To break the price barrier, researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute of Plant Research in Ithaca, N.Y., are working on less expensive cell cultures from insects to grow these viruses. One nonbiotech area of research is the study of how global climate change will impact the distribution and vigor of weeds. David Patterson of USDA's Plant Physiology and Photosynthesis Unit in Raleigh, N.C., says some weeds will become more of a problem while others will decline. "For example, cogongrass, a notorious perennial weed from the Old World, is currently confined to the Gulf Coast states in the U.S.," he says. "But if warming occurs, this weed could become more aggressive and widespread." And, not to be left behind by the Human Genome Project, the National Science Foundation is providing more than $4 million a year in support of sequencing the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana, a model organism used widely in plant genetics research. --S.V. At these universities and others, administrators say, there is a close match between numbers of available jobs and numbers of graduates to claim them. And many point out that this close fit is less a result of chance than of practical steps colleges have taken to decrease enrollment in a slow economy, change traditional career paths in the field to include postdocs, and showcase the marketability of some agriculture subdisciplines for some currently booming scientific fields (see accompanying story). "We haven't had difficulty placing people at all," says University of Wisconsin agronomy department chairman Ronald Doersch. And while many point out that university administrations have cut back agriculture departments in the slow economy, Doersch contends that a sense of realism among agricultural scientists themselves has had a hand in controlling student populations. "We've had more of a dedication than some fields to producing only what the market will bear," Doersch says. Part of that effort to control numbers of graduates has involved changing the traditional career track in agricultural science to include more postdocs, formerly a rarity in the field, researchers say. "People on the applied side still tend to go directly to a position--say in commercial plant breeding," Doersch says. "But a postdoc has become almost a requirement on the basic science side." "There are departments who now have postdocs who wouldn't have considered offering them 10 years ago," says Texas A&M's Suter. He adds that "in the tight-money university climate, many departments are also keeping graduate students on to fill instructor positions"--and not sending them into the job market. Scientists also describe increasing efforts to demonstrate the marketability of agricultural science graduates in some newly popular scientific disciplines, such as land reclamation and other environmental fields. "Agriculture people fit well into the environmental fields because they have solid biology training plus a background that emphasizes ecosystems and economics," says Barry Jacobsen, dean of Montana State University's College of Agriculture in Bozeman. "Agricultural science studies have always been inherently interdisciplinary and systems-oriented." "Soil and water scientists from schools of agriculture have always been environmental scientists," says Suter. "And now that there's significant interest in that area, these departments are restructuring the way they talk about their research, making it clear that they've been doing environment research all along." But while faculty members are happy that the current production of graduates is matching the demand, they worry that the reduced numbers will lead to a shortage of agriculture scientists in the future. "Our [number of graduates] will probably get tighter for the next year or so, because of money problems in the state. That decrease will impact on the need for faculty and researchers three to four years down the road," says Raymond Miller, an agriculture education researcher who is assistant dean for student affairs in Ohio State University's College of Agriculture in Columbus. Other scientists agree that the current slow production of agriculture science graduates will produce a research and teaching shortage in the coming decade, and some add that long-term staffing patterns in agricultural research make this prospect even more likely. "There was massive growth in university and research agriculture in the '50s and '60s, and those people are about to retire. They will have to be replaced," says Montana State's Jacobsen. "But our enrollments in the '80s were quite low, and seem destined to continue low until the recession is over. These people are unlikely to be replaced until that turns around." Poultry scientist Robert Voitle, associate dean for instruction and research at Auburn University in Alabama, cites U.S. Department of Labor statistics that project an upcoming shortfall of agriculture researchers. He adds that low student enrollments interfere with the field's efforts to diversify by attracting more women and minorities. "I don't guess in any area other than production agriculture does the projected level of graduates actually reach the level of opportunity. The data predicts an 11 percent shortfall of expertise in agriculture, with the greatest shortage at the graduate level. It also shows a lack of biology grads who could move over and fill the positions," Voitle says. "Everyone is concerned about where the faculty of the future will come from. And that narrowing of the pipeline has been especially hard on our efforts to attract minority students to diversify the field." Marcia Clemmitt is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.

Plant Science Job Horizon Dimmed By Lack Of Funding

Sep 13, 1992

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