48 



This priority setting, this strategic planning that we are very 

 much involved in at the State and the national level involves many 

 stakeholders, both from the consumers of our end research product, 

 or, if you will, the consumers of the food products which our re- 

 search produces, to the producers and the farmers who are involved 

 in enabling us to be one of the most effective agricultural produc- 

 tion systems in the country. We seek consensus in a network of the 

 State agencies and the Federal agencies. 



All of this comes together, including the ARS, or the Agricultural 

 Research Service, component and other science and education agen- 

 cies, under the auspices of the National Research Council of the 

 Joint Council. This priority setting drives our budget recommenda- 

 tions from NASULGC to the USDA. The product of this planning 

 is the highly selected initiatives in research with rank order prior- 

 ity. In addition, we have identified those research objectives de- 

 scribing how to meet these goals, and, finally, we identified the re- 

 sources required. 



The next question that is presented to us is the percentage of 

 fundamental, applied, and mission-linked research. I would start 

 by sajdng that the Federal system has had a unique opportunity 

 of leveraging over $2 billion in agricultural research activity for an 

 investment of approximately some $430 million from CSRS. This is 

 the unique opportunity — 32 percent investment by the Federal sys- 

 tem in this State-national-tJSDA Ag Research System. Of the in- 

 vestment from the CSRS of over $400 million, approximately 50 

 percent of that is formula funding, and a little over 20 percent is 

 from the National Research Initiative. If your committee desires 

 additional information on that, we would be pleased to present it 

 to you. 



From my personal opinion, having worked at four different land- 

 grant universities in this Nation, I would give you a personal per- 

 spective on what I would estimate the breakdown of how the fimds 

 in the State agricultural experiment station system are spent on 

 breakthrough research, applications research, and that which sits 

 in between, and, again, in this continuum of a perspective from 

 when we start generating the knowledge to when we've got it in 

 the field, if you will. 



Basically, in my experience, I would say that about 25 percent 

 of our funds are spent in developing this breakthrough tecluiology, 

 and about 25 percent is spent maMng sure it gets applied in the 

 field, and this is in close linkage with the Cooperative Extension 

 System. The in-between now is about 50 percent of our funds are 

 spent in between the breakthrough and the application. Keep in 

 mind that in a lot of instances, this might be the same scientist 

 that's working in the fundamental and working in the applied in 

 a team effort with a lot of other discipline scientists. 



I would underscore for you, sir, that all of the research that is 

 done in the State agricultural experiment station system is tar- 

 geted, is mission-oriented, is looked at solving some problem or en- 

 hancing some characteristic in the agricultural arena. 



Well, then, how should this distribution differ, if it should? Keep 

 in mind that in the response to this, there would be quite a vari- 

 able if were to ask each of the Directors of the State agricultural 

 experiment station system because of some of the issues discussed 



