Agricultural Research Needs a Farmer-First Focus

This essay was based on a Breakthrough-commissioned report prepared by Michelle Klieger, Callie McAdams, and Rachel Owens. You can download the full report HERE.

Of the twelve titles in the farm bill, from commodities to crop insurance, conservation to nutrition, the research title, Title VII, has far and away the greatest social return on investment. For every dollar spent on research returns an estimated 20 dollars. When an investment provides returns that are consistently above market rates the conventional wisdom is to up the ante, but for nearly thirty years the US has been doing just the opposite. The most recent estimates suggest that public funding for agricultural R&D has fallen to levels not seen since the 1970s.

The reason for this is not exactly a mystery. Politicians are not graded on some theoretical balance sheet of social well-being. They respond to their voters and to specific constituencies. For the agriculture committees of the House and Senate that write the farm bill and determine agricultural policy, the most important constituency is the American Farmer. While the value that agricultural R&D creates for society has been made clear time and again, whether and to what extent that value accrues to the farmer remains an open question.

Policy advocates have long called for farmers and farm groups to galvanize and vocalize support for federally funded research. But research must also better support farmers. When farmers become partners rather than subjects of research, the results can be transformative, creating new markets and overcoming threats that would otherwise wipe out entire industries.

The farm lobby generally supports federal funding for agricultural research, but has historically failed to push for research investments over more immediate, short term priorities facing U.S. agriculture. To boot, the perception that research is replete with pet projects or far-sighted moonshots that won’t benefit farmers for decades can make farm groups even more hesitant to throw political weight behind research investments.

This skepticism isn't entirely misplaced. Agricultural economist Julian Alston calls the question of whether research actually benefits farmers "contentious" and "serious unfinished business." But this uncertainty has allowed politicians to kick the can on adequately funding agricultural research, which is in turn strangling the innovation pipeline that has enabled humanity to feed more people with less land, less labor, and less environmental impact than ever before.

A new Breakthrough-commissioned report describes several ways in which agricultural research has paid off for farmers. Research in beef genetics has been a long-running story of public and private back-and-forth resulting in quality and productivity improvements which set the groundwork for farmer-led associations to develop new markets around certified breed brands. A different kind of story unfolded in the citrus sector when a disease devastated production in Florida. For the past twenty years, researchers, farmers, and agricultural officials have been scrambling to control the damage, protect production in California, and chart a path forward towards revival in the Sunshine State.

Taking the Long View: Building Beef Excellence

In recent years, U.S. beef production has hovered near all-time highs in both dollars and pounds despite a fifty-year decline in cattle numbers—from 132 million head in 1975 to 87 million in 2023. Today's average steer produces 150 more pounds of beef than fifty years ago, and this productivity revolution has coincided with significant improvements in beef quality.

This transformation required a century of research partnership between government scientists and cattle producers. It began in 1924 when the Fort Keogh Livestock and Range Research Laboratory (LARRL) was established in Miles City, Montana. Researchers at Fort Keogh pioneered genetic evaluation of beef cattle beginning with a herd of 188 Herefords and was built upon in the 1930s by Dr. Jay Lush, a researcher at Iowa State University. In the 1950s the Jorgensen Land and Cattle Company, which had established success with an Angus-Texas Longhorn cross, began implementing the techniques and equations developed at Fort Keogh and Iowa State into their breeding program. The scoring system that was developed, called expected progeny differences, is still in use today.

The payoff came when ranchers and breeders embraced these genetic tools, and found ways to market the improved results. In 1975—at peak cattle—the American Aberdeen-Angus Breeders Association (AAABA) established the Certified Angus Beef brand, the first USDA certified beef brand, based on ten criteria including marbling, rib eye area, and muscling.

Two additional steps forward occurred in the 1990s: first, building on the success of the government-funded human genome project, biotechnology companies began offering tests for genetic markers associated with specific traits, accelerating progress in breeding. Second, the USDA introduced a pricing system in which cattle ranchers could receive payment based on the carcass quality of individual cattle rather than of the predicted average quality of the lot of cattle being sold, further incentivizing improvements in quality. A study commissioned by the AAABA estimated that angus producers earned $92 million in premiums in 2018, doubling to $182 million in premiums in 2021. The rise of Certified Angus Beef has clearly benefited producers. Its performance in premium beef markets—especially among USDA Choice and Prime cuts—has helped drive a sharp increase in total premiums paid to Angus producers in recent years.

Though research may take decades to pay dividends, close engagement with producers and industry associations is key to ensuring eventual adoption of innovations such as new genetic tools and breeds. Without ranchers and the Breeders Association as partners, the genetic tools that enabled Certified Angus Beef could have languished in academic journals without breeder adoption. Likewise, without USDA developing certifications and quality-based pricing systems, producers would not have been able to capture the value that they produced.

The Crisis Response Model: Saving Citrus Through Engagement

The citrus greening crisis offers a more urgent example of how farmer engagement determines research success. Since citrus greening was first detected in Florida in 2005, the disease has devastated the state's industry. A 2012 University of Florida study estimated that the industry lost $3.6 billion in revenue from 2006 to 2012, and production has continued to decline as farmers remove affected trees.

The same disease threat produced divergent outcomes in California, where industry buy-in made the difference. When citrus greening was first detected in Florida, the industry was still recovering from a costly mandatory eradication program for citrus canker. The state pursued an eradication program during the first years of the spread of citrus greening, but abandoned it after finding it ineffective.

California citrus growers, having witnessed the devastation in Florida, embraced research-driven solutions. The state pursued a citrus greening action plan to coordinate intensive quarantine and eradication practices between farmers, industry groups, and state and federal government agencies. The action plan is revised every year, and California recently established grower liaisons to educate and communicate with growers. An affordable cure has yet to reach farmers, but in the time that California’s plan to control the disease has bought, researchers have developed improved PCR tests and even trained dogs to detect the bacteria that causes citrus greening.

Research into disease treatment has shown advancements. In 2025, the University of Florida announced positive results with trees genetically engineered to produce a protein that is fatal to young Asian citrus psyllids, the small pests that spread citrus greening. Other research has found that injecting an antibiotic into the trunk of young trees is more effective than the previous method of external application onto leaves. Any treatment that does not involve methods that have already been approved will need to clear relevant regulatory processes and then be scaled by firms willing to make the investment. Farmers will then need to trust the treatment enough to be willing to invest in orchards, which can take years to grow and years more to show return on investment.

The citrus case illustrates how early engagement with farmers is needed to build the necessary buy-in. Research doesn't just benefit farmers—it requires them as partners. Technologies are worthless if farmers don't adopt them, and adoption depends on farmers seeing research as serving their needs rather than being imposed upon them. It also demonstrates how research can not only benefit producers, but actually preserve and revive an industry from a seemingly existential threat.

Market Expansion turns Productivity into Profitability

The concern that productivity-enhancing agricultural technology will drive down prices, hurting farmers and fueling agglomeration, is rational. If the price elasticity of demand for a given food is low—that is, if consumers will purchase roughly the same amount of food no matter the price—then the reduced price of food that research often enables will not gin up enough demand to make up for the lower value farmers receive for each unit produced or sold.

Some of this can be mitigated through effective outreach and extension ensuring that all farmers have access to the knowledge to implement best practices. In addition to farmer engagement, creating new markets for many farm products is essential to ensure that innovation-driven gains in productivity will benefit farmers.

Bumper crops can be a threat to farmers if prices collapse because there is nobody to buy the unexpected surplus. Export markets provide some insurance against this when a good year in the U.S. coincides with a crop failure on the other side of the globe. If foreign buyers can turn to the United States every time they have a shortage, they may decide to make the U.S. farmers their primary suppliers. In fact, the productivity and reliability of American agriculture has been a major storyline since the end of the second World War, enabling the US to become a major global exporter of corn, wheat, and eventually soybeans, as well as chicken, pork, and beef. When increasing yield can be exported, farmers benefit.

The alternative to research-enabled productivity growth and market expansion is not just a slowdown and preservation of the status-quo, it is productivity decline and loss of markets. Changing weather patterns and the spread of agricultural pests and diseases puts sectors at risk of declining productivity or total collapse. This is the case not only with Florida citrus, but with U.S. poultry production in the face of avian flu, and beef production threatened by New World Screwworm. The U.S. has long been a net exporter of eggs and egg products, but egg imports in the first half of 2025 were ten times greater than a year earlier as the Trump administration sought to facilitate imports from Turkiye and other countries to alleviate skyrocketing prices.

Meanwhile, as other nations invest in productivity enhancing research tailored to local growing conditions, U.S. producers could fall behind and lose standing in international markets. Brazil, for example, has overtaken the U.S. as the top global exporter of soybeans after decades of rising yields and production levels. In 2023, Brazil exported twice as much soy as the U.S. did.

Making Research Farmer-Responsive

Agricultural research has a long history of generating incredible advances that have brought down food prices, fought off pests, and preserved nature by producing more food on less land. But it can nevertheless do more for farmers.

Under the Trump Administration, USDA has promised a new process to “make certain all research funded by USDA provides value to American farmers, ranchers, producers, or foresters.” It’s unclear how USDA plans to carry this out. One place to start is addressing the historic decline in research focused on productivity and yields. The share of USDA research funding that goes to productivity focused projects fell from 64.6 percent in 1976 to 53.3 percent in 2018 as an increasing share of research projects focused on issues like food safety and environmental concerns. While there is important work to be done in these areas, this shift coincided with an overall decrease in total public agricultural research spending, backsliding all the way to 1970s levels. As federal and state expenditures on agricultural research fail to keep up with inflation—much less increase to meet the needs of a growing portfolio of research areas—productivity enhancing research suffers.

Current agricultural research priorities are often set by academic institutions or Washington politicians with limited input from working farmers. One opportunity is for lawmakers to ramp up investments for public-private research led by the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research (FFAR) in the next farm bill. FFAR works with farmer groups such as the US Roundtable for Sustainable Beef to identify the urgent research needs impacting entire sectors, matching every taxpayer dollar with private funding to fund research projects that would be too large for a single firm or farmer to tackle on their own.

Similar to research, federal funding for agricultural extension—the University-affiliated agencies tasked with interpreting research and communicating useful findings to farmers—has declined in recent decades. Those advocating for increased research funding may be hesitant to hitch their horse to a second wagon, but there is good evidence that research and extension are partners in the budget approval process. This makes intuitive sense, as extension agents engage in the on-the-ground work of demonstrating the benefits of agricultural research directly to agricultural constituencies, work that creates impressive public return on investment in its own right. Extension agents also act as intermediaries that can communicate the needs of farmers to researchers back at the Land Grant University or State Agricultural Experiment Station.

This farmer-responsive approach serves broader goals. Research that helps farmers produce more food on less land or with fewer inputs provides environmental benefits. Research that enables premium markets like Certified Angus Beef or prevents industry collapse, as in California’s citrus sector, preserves farmer livelihoods and rural economies.

Agricultural research has been the engine of abundance that feeds a growing world population while reducing the environmental footprint of food production. But this engine depends on political support, and political support depends on clear benefits to farmers. For agricultural research to continue delivering its remarkable returns, it must deliver for the farmers who make those returns possible.