By Bill Tomson, March 12, 2015
(Published by Politico)
It’s a bad year to ask Congress for a 38 percent raise, but that’s exactly what the Obama administration is doing on behalf of a new program that better fosters competition among the nation’s agricultural research universities…Read more.
The Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) in the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) will receive a budget increase of $25 million in fiscal year 2016, an increase that the Supporters of Agricultural Research (SoAR) Foundation applauded today.
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Publicly-supported research pays dividends to all Americans, Vincent "Zippy" Duvall said in an opinion piece that ran in The Hill today. Duvall is the new president of the American Farm Bureau Association and he has embraced the call for a more robust research program at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
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Today, farmers have figured out where to grow most varieties of lettuce at any time of the year. So when romaine was fingered as the source of an E. coli outbreak that sickened 43 people in 12 states, the federal government was able to roll back this blanket prohibition and limit the recall to produce from central California farms, where most of the romaine is grown at this time of year. But limitations in science prevent any further specificity.
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