Peace Garden News

WASHINGTON – Senator John Hoeven on June 28, 2023 held a meeting with former House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson and North Dakota State University (NDSU) leadership to discuss efforts to:

• Ensure strong support for agriculture research in North Dakota.
  • As ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Appropriations Committee, Hoeven advanced more than $50 million in agriculture research funding for North Dakota as part of the Senate’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 Agriculture Appropriations bill, which was recently approved by the full Senate Appropriations Committee.
• Establish a new agriculture policy research center at North Dakota State University (NDSU), having secured $2 million toward this effort in the Senate’s FY24 funding legislation. The center would:
  • Help address farm and agribusiness challenges through in-depth policy and economic analysis.
  • Bring North Dakota expertise to policymakers in Washington, D.C.
  • Complement the work conducted at similar centers, including:
    • The Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) at the University of Missouri.
    • The Agricultural and Food Policy Center (AFPC) at Texas A&M University.
    • The National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

“No one does agriculture better than North Dakota’s farmers and ranchers, and agriculture research plays a key role in our state’s competitive edge,” said Hoeven. “The ag policy research center that we’re working to bring to NDSU builds upon this strong foundation and would help ensure the policies being advanced in Washington, D.C. meet the needs of our farmers and ranchers in the Upper Midwest, complementing the work being done at institutions in Missouri, Texas and Nebraska.”

“A policy center made up of our 12 land-grant universities across the Midwest will be able to focus on the issues most important to midwestern agriculture, like crop insurance, livestock production and biofuels, just to name a few,” Peterson said. “This kind of coalition will foster the collaboration that we need to better inform Members of Congress, USDA and the Administration and to ensure strong farm policy for our region.”

North Dakota Ag Research Priorities

            Hoeven worked to include the following priorities as part of the $50 million provided for North Dakota agriculture research in the Senate’s FY24 funding legislation:

• More than $25 million for Agriculture Research Service (ARS) and National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) research conducted across North Dakota.
  • This funding supports research conducted by North Dakota’s three ARS research stations, as well as national agriculture research programs in which NDSU participates.
  • Examples include sugarbeet research at the Fargo ARS facility, canola research at NDSU and soil health research at the Mandan ARS facility. 
• $20.5 million for research initiatives specifically led by NDSU, including:
  • Autonomous Systems and Agricultural Data Security.
  • Predictive Crop Performance Research.
  • Fusion Machine Learning Research.
  • Controlled Environment Agriculture.
  • Agricultural Measurement and Monitoring Innovation Lab.
  • UAS in Precision Agriculture research.
• $2.5 million to continue an AgTech Cooperative Agreement between Grand Farm, NDSU and ARS.
• $3 million to support additional renovations at the ARS Edward T. Schafer Agricultural Research Center in Fargo.

ARS & NIFA Ag Research Funding

• $13.9 million for ARS Sugarbeet Research.
• $3 million for ARS Barley Pest Initiative.
• $5 million for ARS Genetic Oat Research.
• $5.6 million for ARS Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) Research.
• $1.5 million for the Healthy Soils Initiative.
• $6 million, an increase of $500,000, for ARS’ Pulse Crop Quality Initiative.
• $4 million for the Alfalfa Seed and Alfalfa Forage Systems Research program.
• $2 million for the Farm Business Management Program.
• $1 million for a new ARS Wheat Resiliency research initiative.
• $15 million for the Wheat and Barley Scab Initiative.
• $2.4 million for the National Sclerotinia Initiative.
• $2 million for the National Canola Research program.
• $3.5 million for the Small Grains Genomic Initiative.
• $5 million for the National Predictive Modeling Tool Initiative.

Original source can be found here.