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 II. DESCRIPTION OF THE FACILITIES CRISIS 



Research is the cornerstone of the federal agricultural 

 program. It is a proud tradition, deemed extremely useful by law 

 makers and the public. Its importance in the larger scheme of 

 things was most recently demonstrated in the 1990 farm bill, where 

 research issues consumed more pages than farm subsidy supports, 

 pesticide recordkeeping requirements, and commodity check-off 

 programs combined. 



In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was 

 originally conceived as a research facility. Two of our earliest, 

 and arguably greatest, Presidents — George Washington and Thomas 

 Jefferson — were deeply involved with agricultural experiments at 

 Mount Vernon and Monticello, respectively. Neither was successful 

 in obtaining congressional support for a national program, however, 

 and it WdS left to Abraham Lincoln to establish the USDA in 1862. 

 Located on the mall where the Smithsonian Institution sits today, 

 the USDA was our first official national agricultural research 

 station. Still, it was many years later — not until 1938 — that 

 Congress was ready to build facilities outside the Nation's 

 capitol, initiating one regional laboratory in each of the four 

 major farm-producing areas of the country to develop new uses for 

 agricultural crops. 



Research has greatly expanded since the Depression Era, and 

 today the federal government supports two kinds of agricultural 

 research facilities. First are the Agricultural Research Service 

 (ARS) facilities, found at 126 federally owned and operated sites. 

 This sounds like a small number of facilities, but there are 

 usually several buildings at each site — more than 3,000 ARS 

 facilities altogether. ARS simply refers to each site as a single 

 facility since the research occurring at each location is overseen 

 by the same administrators. 



