WASHINGTON -Bush budget cuts would hit important research programs that examine everything from soybeans and dairy production to cattle viruses, agriculture school officials complained to Congress yesterday.
Fred Cholick, dean of the agriculture college at Kansas State University, said the cuts threaten the original mission of Ohio State University and the other land-grant schools, created by Congress in the 1800s to use public money on shared agricultural research.
Under the Bush plan, funding for programs on farming, forestry and animal health, mainstays at land-grant institutions for decades, would be slashed from $200 million this year to $100 million next year and nothing in 2007.
Some money -about $70 million -would be available to schools through competitive grants, but school officials say the change would be so sudden that about 2,000 jobs nationwide would be lost immediately. The cuts also would destroy a network of research collaboration that allows states to work together to thwart agriculture diseases and develop better practices.
If everything goes competitive
then it's everybody for themselves said Bobby Moser, dean and vice president of the agriculture college at Ohio State University. We lose the network.
Moser and about 120 other school officials and agriculture research supporters fanned out across Capitol Hill to lobby their hometown lawmakers in favor of the programs.
The schools use the money to study both national priorities -food security, pest control, obesity, waste management -and local issues, such as cattle diarrhea in Wyoming, dairy breeding in Pennsylvania and which pesticides to use at macadamia nut farms in Hawaii.
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