to Work in the Agricultural Community
Mike Brown
USDA--Small Farm Research Center
Booneville, Arkansas
&
Bill Tallent
USDA--Agricultural Research Service
Beltsville, Maryland
The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) has approximately 8,500 employees, 2,800 of whom are research scientists. The current ARS annual budget is a little more than $700 million. The 104 ARS research locations around the nation range in size from the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC), the largest agricultural research center in the world, to small research stations with a minimum critical mass of scientists and support staff. BARC has more than 1,000 employees, including about 300 research scientists. Next in size are a dozen research centers, each with employees numbering in the hundreds, then a score of slightly smaller research laboratories.
We have a presence on nearly every 1862 land grant university campus and on five 1890 land grant universities. The latter is a result of the efforts of the USDA-1890 Land Grant Universities' Task Force. An ARS research station of particular relevance to this Conference is the South Central Family Farms Research Unit at Booneville, Arkansas. The South Central Agricultural Research Laboratory in Lane, Oklahoma, also emphasizes research for small farms.
A computer search using "Small Farms" as key words found 81 projects at 47 ARS locations. A few examples show the range of these projects. Research at BARC concerns new varieties of fruits and vegetables suitable for direct marketing and use of hairy vetch as an organic mulch for tomato production. Performance evaluations of forage crop varieties are conducted at Starkville, Mississippi, as are economic compa-risons of large round hay bale storage methods at East Lansing, Michigan. At Poplarville, Mississippi, an inexpensive farm-built forced air cooler to remove field heat from blueberries for the fresh fruit market is under development. Other examples were studies of biological weed control at Pullman, Washington, and a comparison of soil erosion models based on different technologies at Durant, Oklahoma.
Of course, there are many other ARS research projects relevant to small farms that were not picked up in this search. For example, ARS research in the broad category of sustainable agriculture includes studies of minimum tillage, green manure crops, crop rotation and inter-cropping, as well as the above mentioned work on organic mulches. There are projects to evaluate alternative industrial crops for niche markets such as crambe, kenaf, guayule and others. Systems engineers are developing decision support systems such as Exnut (for peanuts - Dawson, Georgia), Gossym-Comax (for cotton - Starkville, Mississippi) and Glycym (for soybeans - Beltsville, Maryland).
Interaction with ARS scientists on projects of interest can be found through formal Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs), or less formal linkups with ARS scientists or laboratories. CRADAs have the advantage of giving the cooperator preferential licensing rights to patents on inventions made in the course of the cooperative research. Such consortia would fit in two categories of preferences in the ARS technology transfer programs: small businesses in rural locations.
An analysis made in April, 1995, showed that of 207 CRADAs implemented after 1990, 73 were with rural firms or organizations and 77 Small Farms consortia or cooperatives could be formed around some common interest and an ARS laboratory could provide technical support through a CRADA. Examples might be direct marketing of fresh produce or converting soybean oil into diesel fuel involved sustainable agriculture technologies. Of the 118 ARS patent licenses granted during this period, 25 were with rural licensees and 41 covered sustainable agriculture inventions. Approximately, 55 percent of ARS patent licenses are with small, minority-owned or female-owned, or rural area businesses. Anyone interested in developing a CRADA or other cooperative agreement with an ARS laboratory or scientist should contact the laboratory or scientist, or the Office of Technology Transfer at (301) 504-5345.
Return to Table of Contents
Return to Title Page