Jul 3, 2008

Thirty Days in July Could Open Door To New Future

George Bush’s “legacy” has become even more befuddling.

Is he to be remembered as the president who vetoed a Farm Bill that has some really progressive new stuff in it? Or should he be remembered for his administration’s role in getting that really progressive stuff into the bill before he vetoed it more than a year later?

The confusion showed up at USDA, too. Even as the Farm Bill was still caught in snafu-land, having been passed and vetoed in the wrong version and repassed again, effectively negating the veto, USDA employees were trying to prepare to meet a Sept. 30 deadline that would be effective if the bill became law. They would have to hand out $27 million in new grants for research that specialty crops growers had worked hard to get – and which Congress said, in the bill, USDA has to spend before the fiscal year ends.

Here’s the situation. Your boss, the president, vetoed legislation that he – and you, as a working stiff at USDA – are now obliged by law to implement. And because of the dithering by both sides, it’s June and the fiscal year ends in 100 days, so it has a deadline built in that would be hard to meet even if the president liked the bill.

The “result” showed up in a mid-June document announcing a plan to announce a plan.

“It is anticipated that the SCRI Request for Applications will be released in July 2008 with a 30-day open period,” according to the announcement from the Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service (CSREES). SCRI stands for Specialty Crop Research Initiative.

The signal was good enough. People – many of them researchers – who had pushed hard as part of the Specialty Crop Farm Bill Alliance got the message. Many of them already had research proposals in mind – and probably in draft form on their laptop computers – waiting for the signal to proceed.

“All applicants are required to provide funds or in-kind support from non-federal sources in an amount that is at least equal to the federal funds requested,” the CSREES announcement said.

“Eligible applicants include federal agencies, national laboratories, colleges and universities, research institutions and organizations, private organizations or corporations, state agricultural experiment stations, individuals or groups consisting of two or more of these entities.”

It should be noted that the process is competitive. The best ideas will win a share, and more funding will be asked for than is available.

In a nutshell, the door will open for proposals. The SCRI gets $500 million in new, mandated funding over five years. Of that, $230 million must go for research targeted to five areas. One of those areas is new innovations and technology: mechanization. Attention is expected to focus on mobile platforms, bin fillers, sensors, imaging, robotics – machines and concepts to reduce the labor intensiveness of fruit and vegetable production.

It has been 30 years since USDA support for research aimed at replacing human labor with machines was largely curtailed by order of the secretary of agriculture.

Dan Guyer, one of the remaining two agricultural engineers at Michigan State University devoted to specialty crop mechanization, said the path is open for researchers to support a vision laid out by the Tree Fruit Technology Roadmap. He spoke at the Controlled Atmosphere Storage Clinic in Clarksville, Mich., two days after the CSREES announcement.

To Bush’s credit, he vetoed the Farm Bill because it didn’t contain reforms he wanted – and the bill would have been much better with those reforms in it. There is virtually no reason left to make direct payments to farmers based on production history.

And the Farm Bill is expensive, lit up like a Christmas tree with new provisions enfranchising specialty crops producers and organic farmers, who were virtually ignored in previous Farm Bills.

Still, part of that was put there by his administration. Bush needs to be credited for the work done by his Secretary of Agriculture, Mike Johanns, and the man who replaced him as acting secretary, Chuck Conner. They led listening sessions in many parts of the country and developed the administration’s version of the Farm Bill. That version contained the Specialty Crop Research Initiative, now poised to bring a breath of fresh air to horticulture.