50 



assessment that the competitive grants program, with relatively 

 long-term projects of 3 to 5 years, can be made to work well here. 



It seems to me that it is inevitable that these kinds of funds will 

 be geographically and institutionally concentrated. A relevant issue 

 to ask is, Did the quality and quantity of research improve as a re- 

 sult of that process? If fiinds are going to be allocated by some 

 quota, perhaps old formulas are as good as any. 



An area which we believe is quite important for serious scrutiny 

 is livestock research, given that during the period of 1950 to 1982 

 there was much lower productivity in the livestock sector and much 

 lower rates of return to investments — public research investment 

 there. It seems that there is room for much greater cooperation and 

 perhaps a consortium should be formed between the State agri- 

 culture experiment stations and the USDA. The group could set re- 

 search priorities and coordinate a grants program. 



Large animal research is relatively expensive to conduct. The 

 benefits seem likely — at least for nongrazing livestock — to spread 

 widely across the States. Also, livestock production tends to be 

 more geographically concentrated than crop production and the 

 centers of livestock production have moved overtime. 



We believe that there should be much stronger incentives for the 

 States to cooperate together and to cooperate with ARS and the 

 USDA. We believe that there should be more scientists given access 

 to the research facilities that are available or made available, and 

 when new livestock research facilities are located or decisions made 

 on renovating, a modest to small number of very high quality facili- 

 ties seem likely to have a better social payoff than a large number 

 of lower quality facilities. 



Also, the locations at which facilities are renovated or where new 

 ones are located should be ones that are complementary with many 

 other activities associated with advances in the sciences. We be- 

 lieve that for applied work being close to the centers of production 

 of the commodity or other activities that are primarily associated 

 with it are very important for finding out about the problems, get- 

 ting the technology transferred, and also for being located close to 

 where advances in general and pretechnology science are taking 

 place. 



Also, as I have suggested, we believe that there should be much 

 greater access given to the facilities in terms of people who have 

 access to them, perhaps that space and time be allocated on a com- 

 petitive basis for the use of the facility, and less attention given to 

 competitiveness on its location. This would make for more general 

 usefulness of the facilities to scientists in other States and bring 

 potentially much greater intellectual power to the experiments 

 being designed and not make the facilities themselves such a limit- 

 ing factor. 



Thank you. 



[The prepared statement of Mr. Huffman appears at the conclu- 

 sion of the hearing.] 



Mr. Stenholm. Thank you very much. 



Mr. Chubin. 



