In the front hall of the American Gothic cottage that Justin Morrill built in Strafford, Vt., hangs his meticulous, hand-drawn plan for its gardens and orchards. It dates to the late 1840s. Morrill, a blacksmith’s son who never attended college, had enjoyed a successful career as a merchant, and he retired to his hometown at 38 to marry and indulge his passion for horticulture on a 50-acre hillside farm. He planned to try growing a wide variety of plants and trees, in addition to raising sheep and cattle, and his neighbors were welcome to visit to see the progress of his various experiments.
You could say that the map Marissa Keys is holding as she leads the way across a field here this afternoon is a descendant of Morrill’s tidy garden outline. Ms. Keys, an agroecology major at Pennsylvania State University, is part of a joint Penn State-U.S. Department of Agriculture team studying ways to make the crops that feed dairy herds more sustainable. The map of the team’s 13-acre project shows a patchwork of plots testing rotations of crops, herbicide levels, methods of distributing manure, and kinds of farm equipment—all with the aim of controlling weeds and pests effectively, cheaply, and safely while producing plenty of healthful food for the cows.
One of the team’s many experiments will test canola as a winter cover crop. “It breaks pest and weed cycles,” Ms. Keys says, adding that you can then press the canola to make biodiesel fuel for your tractor, as well as feed your cows canola meal.
Almost everything on this 2,000-acre spread of university land plays some role in research. Pieces of slate in the field can be lifted to count bugs and worms that have taken refuge beneath. On a slope nearby are plots set up so that the amount of moisture lost to the soil can be precisely calculated. Even the tractors here are research tools, says Bruce McPheron, dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State. The university worked with New Holland, the equipment maker, to prove that biodiesel fuel would not harm the company’s engines.
All of this is, in a sense, Morrill’s doing. He did not live out his days in Strafford as planned. Elected to Congress in 1854, he soon took the lead in pressing legislators to grant land to the states for the creation of agricultural colleges. President James Buchanan vetoed the first bill Morrill got passed, in 1859, but on July 2, 1862—150 years ago next month—Abraham Lincoln signed Morrill’s second agriculture-school bill into law. Along with another measure he championed, in 1890, it created a system of land-grant colleges that rooted agriculture firmly in university research and helped democratize American higher education, creating institutions not for the sons and daughters of the upper classes but for the children of farmers.
Morrill’s vision was that land-grant colleges could teach students to “feed, clothe, and enlighten the great brotherhood of man.” As land-grant-university officials prepare to visit Washington this month to celebrate their institutions on the National Mall during the Smithsonian Institution’s annual folklife festival, they say that the agriculture colleges that are at the core of Morrill’s mission are more popular with students than they’ve been in decades, and that the institutions’ pathbreaking research and teaching are more critical than ever in a world facing huge population increases, climate change, and shortages of energy, water, and food.
‘Right Now We’re Hurting’
But state-budget cuts mean that many of the agriculture colleges are raising tuition and having to do more with less at the same time that they’re trying to make sure curricula and research keep pace with an agricultural economy that is not just increasingly high-tech but also increasingly global. Many deans are casting worried glances at institutions in India and China, which are investing heavily in higher education and in research.
And agriculture-college administrators note that compared with the National Institutes of Health’s research-grant budget, which is more than $30-billion, and the National Science Foundation’s, just under $6-billion, the Department of Agriculture’s grants for research are tiny: $285-million, though the department does about $1-billion of research itself—much of it in its facilities on agriculture-college campuses.
Corporate research increasingly supplements what public funds support, but much of what companies do is proprietary, and—as with pharmaceutical research—university researchers who have accepted corporate money have sometimes struggled with the strings attached. A report released this spring by Food & Water Watch, a Washington consumer-advocacy group, complains that private-sector research money “not only corrupts the public research mission of land-grant universities, but also distorts the science that is supposed to help farmers improve their practices and livelihoods.”
“Right now we’re hurting because of these budget cuts,” says Jack Payne, senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources at the University of Florida, where the agriculture college is the university’s third-largest—and where a state-budget cut of $36-million to the university this year followed a $33-million cut the year before. “There are no more rocks to turn over.”
He says the arguments for supporting agriculture education are plain: “I have growers tell me all the time if it wasn’t for our research, they couldn’t stay in business.” And because the recession has cut back tourism, he says, agriculture is once again “the backbone of Florida’s economy.”
What keeps Mr. Payne awake nights, though, is the planet’s projected population growth from seven billion to nine billion people in coming decades. “We have to grow more food in the next 50 years than we’ve grown in the last 1,500,” he says. “In 1946, the average yield per acre for corn was 46 bushels. Today it’s over 220 or 230 bushels, with some plots pushing 300.” But increasing food production to feed an additional two billion people is not going to happen unless the United States and other capable countries vigorously support agriculture research and education, he says.
J. Scott Angle agrees. Mr. Angle is dean of the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences at the University of Georgia and chair of the Agriculture Assembly of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, and he says “the life of many people on this planet is dependent on our graduates and our scientists.” But the challenges he sees are formidable.
“There’s no more land, so we’ve got to double yield,” he says. “That’s got to come with advances in technology. We can enhance food production with a lot more chemicals, but that would have a negative impact on the environment, so we don’t want to do that. We’re going to have less labor in agriculture, so we’ll have to have more mechanization. And there’s no more water, just like there’s no more land.”
Bumper Crop
What’s not in short supply are interested students. Here at Penn State, the agriculture college’s undergraduate population has risen by 48 percent since 2006, and it stands now at 3,000—four-fifths of whom are not from farm backgrounds. Mr. McPheron, the dean, says the increase comes thanks to a strong demand for employees from a wide range of food-related industries, as well as to students’ interest both in new issues, like sustainability and local foods, and in traditional careers like farming and, in Pennsylvania’s case, growing juice grapes in the state’s northwestern “Concord belt.”
Mr. McPheron, an entomologist himself, likes to remind people that the agriculture college is “not just cows and plows.” Animal and dairy science remains the largest major, but nowadays it’s as much about high-tech genetics, microbiology, and veterinary medicine as about herding cattle and running milking machines. Food science is another big major—Penn State’s program is the largest in the country, says Mr. McPheron, and it has close to a 100-percent job-placement rate within six months of graduation. The college also offers courses in agriculture economics, agriculture engineering, community development and the environment, entomology, forestry, marketing, plant and soil science, and veterinary science, among others. The landscaping and turf-management programs are standouts, the dean says, and the turf program’s online offerings are the university’s oldest.
But Penn State has been hit hard by Pennsylvania’s budget woes, and many of the agriculture college’s programs are expensive to run. They require sophisticated labs or costly production equipment or animals that must be fed and cared for—or all of the above. “We find ourselves more and more pressured,” says Mr. McPheron, who in recent years has lost $18.5-million from what was once a $100-million budget. Even though he doesn’t expect further cuts for the coming year, increasing costs mean he’ll have a $3-million deficit to deal with. Meanwhile, 82 of the college’s employees took a voluntary-retirement deal the university offered last year. They left behind “a number of programs I feel are fragile—where the number of faculty members is not adequate.”
Like many agriculture deans, Mr. McPheron meets regularly with an advisory group—which, in his case, represents about 100 companies and organizations. “They say that the technical subject matter we’re doing fine with, but they want students with soft skills—kids who can work in teams, who communicate well, who have global awareness, who have leadership skills.”
So the college is developing more internship and study-abroad opportunities. “In 2000 in our college, half of 1 percent of our students had an international experience,” he says. “This year it’s 28 percent.” The college is also taking a new look at other outside-the-classroom experiences, like clubs and teams, that give students chances to work together. There’s a poultry-science club, for instance, that arranges community-service events and brings guest speakers to the campus, while a soil-judging team goes up against students from other universities in an annual competition sponsored by the Soil Science Society of America.
Iowa State University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences is facing similar soft-skills requests from employers, says Wendy Wintersteen, the dean. “A couple of years ago we added the first new major in probably more than a decade, in global-resource systems. You’re going to spend half your time developing cultural competency in a specific region of the world, and you’re going to come out prepared to go to work for a company with international operations.”
She’s also hearing something surprising from companies. “A growing competitor for them in hiring,” she says, “is that more and more students see opportunities for themselves back on their farms with their families,” as a result of rising worldwide demand for agricultural products. This year Iowa State’s agriculture college will enroll more than 3,600 students, matching the record set some 30 years ago, she says.
Ability to Evolve
But making sure that what those students learn keeps pace with developments in agriculture is an endless task. “I was out planting soybeans with a farmer the other day,” Ms. Wintersteen says. “The tractor was driving itself, the planter was connected to the tractor, and the farmer was looking at a data readout.” As agriculture continues to evolve at a rapid clip, the ability of today’s students to evolve with it could prove far more important than whatever perishable material they learn in courses.
And continued evolution seems assured, unless some catastrophe intervenes. Forty years ago, total farm receipts in California were about equal to those of Iowa or Texas, says Neal K. Van Alfen, dean of agriculture at the University of California at Davis, but today California’s receipts equal those of the other two states put together, and enrollment in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences is growing. “California agriculture has been extremely dynamic and entrepreneurial,” he says, explaining that the big money in the state’s agricultural markets is in specialty crops—fruits and vegetables—rather than the row crops for which the middle of the country is famous. “We compete in the global economy with most of our current crops.”
A number of agriculture-college deans say that, with state funds likely to remain in short supply, something will have to give. “We do need to find some different models to support this system,” Georgia’s Mr. Angle says. “My own opinion is, I don’t think we can afford to duplicate all programs in all states,” as is more or less the case now. “Ultimately what I think will happen is that a lot of states will teach and research in areas that are important for them.”
There’s a potential roadblock, though: Some institution will have to be the first to drop a high-profile program and risk the wrath of a very interested constituency. “Even though I may have a relatively small commodity within the state, those individuals may have the ability to push us to remain in that area,” Mr. Angle says, noting that farmers have proved more than adept at politics over the decades. For the time being, he and other deans are looking for small opportunities to work together, in the hope that doing so may lead to bigger collaborations later on.
Meanwhile, students continue to come. Mr. McPheron introduces a few.
Steve Bookbinder, who grew up in Miami and went to work in restaurants, developed an interest in charcuterie—cured meats, sausages, pâtés, and the like—and has come to Penn State to study meat science so he can open his own business one day. Lingyan Dong came from Fuzhou, China, to study environmental-resource management, and hopes to work for China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection.
And Brianna Isenberg, from Indiana, Pa., just graduated after majoring in animal science. She’s working at the Agriculture Department’s pasture-systems office on the campus, calculating changes in the carbon footprint of beef cattle since the 1970s.
Justin Morrill, sitting on the porch of his Vermont cottage and looking out over his gardens, probably never imagined such a range of interests among students at his agriculture colleges, or such a range of offerings by the colleges themselves. What he could imagine, and did, was the system that has made so much possible.
First in an occasional series on the state of the land-grant colleges.