“WHEN people hear I work for the US Department of Agriculture, they think I must be doing some kind of meat inspection,” says Rob Mandrell. Of course, inspection plays a part in the USDA’s work, but what Mandrell does could hardly be more different.
He is one of some 2000 scientists who work for the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), the department’s research arm. The service’s personnel list includes scientists whose publications are among the most frequently cited in agricultural science. “Yet what we do is a little under-appreciated,” says Dwayne Buxton, one of its administrators. The ARS has only a fraction of the spending power of the National Institutes of Health, he adds. “But we do a lot with what we have.”
The full impact of USDA research is, in fact, hard to gauge. Take the department’s work on that mainstay of most modern homes: frozen food. In December 2002, the American Chemical Society (ACS) awarded National Historical Chemical Landmark status to the ARS for its studies on frozen food. The haphazard adoption of freezing technology after the second world war created a slew of poor-tasting, badly preserved food that gave the technology a bad name.
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Between 1948 and 1965, ARS scientists developed analytical methods to measure and improve food quality and aroma, and made dozens of breakthroughs in understanding the physiology and enzymology of frozen-food spoilage. The ACS cites these studies as being responsible for reviving the industry, which now has sales of $70 billion a year and accounts for one-quarter of all American food exports.
The continuing mission of the ARS is to benefit food consumers and producers, and to create new markets for food products, says Buxton. Even so, its current portfolio of more than a thousand projects is surprisingly diverse, organised into 22 national programmes with titles ranging from “Human Nutrition” to “Manure and Byproduct Utilization”. Many of the researchers focus on bread-and-butter food issues – quite literally, in a few cases. But the ARS also has projects of interest to the fuel industry, and even astronauts.
While the USDA has been conducting research into agriculture and related issues for more than a century (see Timeline), the ARS was not created until 1953. Today it operates more than a hundred regional laboratories across the US, as well as labs in Argentina, Australia, China and France.
Part of its research mandate is to keep farmers productive by improving farming practices. This involves some straightforward strategies on how to fight soil erosion, pests and animal diseases. The foreign laboratories, for instance, all focus on prospecting for natural enemies of exotic invasive insects, weeds or fungi. “The idea is to fight these invaders, but reduce the use of petrochemicals and non-renewable resources,” says Chuck Quimby, director of the French laboratory. To combat the invasive weed leafy spurge, for example, his team has identified more than a dozen insects that eat the plant, some of which have already been put to work to reduce the weed’s spread in the northern US.
The hunt for new techniques in agriculture not only takes ARS researchers to new countries, but sends them off in unexpected directions. For instance, entomologist Judy Johnson at the San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Sciences Center in California is using radio waves to kill insects that hide inside nuts and fruit as an alternative to the ozone-depleting biocide methyl bromide. And Roman Hruska at the USDA’s Meat Animal Research Center in Nebraska is adopting ultrasound equipment to examine cattle on the hoof, making it easier for farmers to select the best breeding animals for a particular cut of meat.
For many farm products in the US, the problem is not how to produce more of them, but what to do with the excess. So another hot topic is finding new uses for crops. One example is Starchafoam, a completely biodegradable Styrofoam substitute. Greg Glenn’s team at the Western Regional Research Center (WRRC) in Albany, California, is already working with EarthShell, a company in Santa Barbara, to make fast-food containers with the new material.
Starchafoam has a big drawback: unlike Styrofoam, it has to be coated for water resistance. So Glenn’s team is now working on a way to include the coating in the processing to make it a fully competitive product. “I like that we aren’t just working on pie-in-the-sky ideas,” says Glenn. “One day we can think of a product and a few years later you can see it on the grocery shelf.”
Or you might even find your work on board the space shuttle. Tara McHugh’s group at WRRC has worked with NASA to create drinking straws made of fruit “films”, and other edible packaging for use on space missions. These waste-reducing products also have many uses back on Earth.
While the ARS is focused on bringing the benefits of science to the farm and the marketplace, Buxton says it also carries out a great deal of basic research. “For intractable problems we need a better understanding of the basic mechanisms to make progress,” he says. One example he cites is the Plant Gene Expression Center, which ARS operates in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley. Researchers there are working on the basic genetic mechanisms of plant light perception, hormone regulation and other processes.
Similarly, David Swain, a veterinary researcher at the ARS’s Southeast Poultry Research Lab in Georgia, says that his work to improve vaccines and detection methods for avian influenza naturally involves a mixture of approaches. “We always try out scientific ideas that are new and sometimes outlandish,” he says. “But at the end of the day we want something that could be commercially used in the field.”
Although many of the ideas for new projects are generated by scientists themselves, politics also plays a strong part in determining the department’s research goals. Mandrell’s research on the genomics of the food pathogen Campylobacter, for example, arose from new food safety legislation signed by President Bill Clinton. Similarly, action by state and local politicians or interest groups can trigger new project goals.
A shift in focus towards biosecurity following the 11 September terrorist attacks has led to another shake-up. As a result, the USDA’s Plum Island Laboratory, which conducts research on livestock diseases such as foot and mouth, will become part of the new Department of Homeland Security this summer. And until last month the USDA, which has historically welcomed many foreign scientists to its labs, was not able to sponsor visas for new foreign applicants because of security concerns.
Though ARS scientists occasionally find that the shifting political winds have changed or eliminated their projects, working for the federal government still has its perks. Unlike most academic researchers, whose lives revolve around a succession of grant applications, ARS scientists have their proposals reviewed every five years by a panel of external experts. Scientists at the ARS have no obligation to teach, so they can focus on their research. And those who do yearn for the classroom are free to take adjunct professorships with nearby universities.
Another way in which the USDA differs from an academic institution is in its relationship with industry. The USDA is eager to pass technology on to the private sector, and researchers work closely with companies. But they are not allowed to create start-ups the way many university professors are now encouraged to do. Once an idea is ripe for implementation, the USDA casts about for an industrial partner. Then, typically, the government retains the patent and the company gets the first licensing rights to the technology. Researchers cannot invest in these companies, but they do get a 25 per cent share of the licensing royalties up to a maximum of $150,000 a year.
In fact, partly because of its close relationship to agribusiness, the USDA is sometimes accused of promoting the wrong agenda. A few years ago, Buxton recalls, some ARS fields were vandalised in protest against its work on genetically modified crops. He understands why people get upset about these issues. “When you think about what is essential for survival of mankind, food and agriculture are pretty high up there,” he says.
But he insists that the service has a good record of taking an even-handed approach to agriculture. As well as high-tech research on cloning livestock and GM plants, it also works on issues relevant to organic farming, biocontrol and GM risk assessment strategies. “I think ARS helps the debate by being an unbiased third party without an axe to grind,” he says.
