The Downtown Farmer’s Market of State College features locally grown produce such as these apples from Patchwork Farms in Aaronsburg. Photo by Erica Wallace

by Jennifer Chesworth

This past spring, just as farmers in Pennsylvania were preparing their fields for the season, dark clouds that had been looming overhead for years broke into a media storm: Big Brother was going to make farming illegal.

The attack came in the form of a bipartisan U.S. Senate Bill HR 875, the Food Safety Modernization Act.

Farmers, who are always concerned when new laws affecting agriculture come into play, furrowed their brows and kept on working in their fields, but the blogosphere—that indoor, blue-screened world that never sees a corn seed sprout—suddenly filled with a flurry of alarms and accusations.

HR 875 was taking Chicken Little out of the hen house altogether and letting the giant corporate fox take over. According to one blogger, “the food police [were] criminalizing organic farming and the backyard gardener.” Another wrote that it was “the death of farmers’ markets, CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture), and local foods.”

“This horrific bill would establish a ‘Food Safety Administration’ within the Department of Health and Human Services,” one blogger explained. “The mandate of this new department would be ‘to protect the public health by preventing food-borne illness, ensuring the safety of food, improving research on contaminants leading to food-borne illness, and improving security of food from intentional contamination, and for other purposes.’”

Why would an anonymous blogger think protecting public health was “horrific?”

The proposed bill had no specific language that would criminalize local and organic foods. Its purpose was expressed in broad terms, addressing food safety, labeling, inspection and enforcement.

In the same manner that the National Organic Program standards were crafted, the bill called for creation of rules that would be determined in what was likely to be a long and arduous process of debate and public comment, to take place after the bill was passed.

If consumer groups and small farm advocates were suspicious, it was not because of anything expressly proposed in this bill. Their opposition could only have been based on the assumption that big business would control the process. Those suspicions may or may not have been founded.

Lobbying expenses by food product manufacturers leaped from around $16 million in 2007 to nearly $30 million in 2008 according to the donor tracking site OpenSecrets.org.

Top contributors included the Food Marketing Institute (greater than $6 million), Grocery Manufacturers of America (greater than $4 million), Kraft Foods (nearly $4 million) and Nestle (nearly $2 million), none of which is known for defending the little guy.

In 2008, direct campaign contributions from the industry exceeded $12 million, 68 percent of which went to Republicans.

The apparent hysteria over HR 875, however, seemed to have more than the public good in mind. Food-borne illnesses affect 76 million Americans annually—that’s one in four—indicating a clear need for better food safety rules.

But anti-HR 875 propaganda was so well-publicized on the Internet that many people in the organic and local foods community are wondering if it wasn’t just another industrial war game. Were corporate interests, posing as allies and playing on the fears of small farmers and “locavores,” attempting to defeat the bill? Or more precisely, to avoid exposing their practices and paying extra costs associated with food safety?

“Who knows who it was,” said Brian Snyder, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA), based in Millheim. “There are lots of companies that depend on farm products—including cosmetics, body care products, dietary supplements, along with the entire food industry—that will be affected by new legislation. Somebody out there apparently wanted to avoid being regulated with greater scrutiny.”

HR 875 died in the fire from all the hype. A new, revised bill, spearheaded by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Rep. John D. Dingell, D-Mich., titled HR 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act, is on its way through the House and Senate.

A proposed $1,000 annual registration fee for all food processing facilities, to cover costs of mandatory inspections, has already been halved in response to industry uproar.

Still, the new legislation is being hailed as a bipartisan effort as both government and industry leaders work to set aside divisive tactics and come to agreement on much-needed improvements to the nation’s food safety system.

Well-worn arguments, framing policy decisions as a battle among big government, state’s rights and individual freedom, will have to be overcome, and legislators will need to integrate and harmonize all three in order to create a sound and safe food system.

“There’s been an unfortunate amount of noise and disinformation floating around,” said Emily Brown Rosen, policy director for Pennsylvania Certified Organic (PCO), based in Spring Mills. “It’s true that we need to make sure policy takes scale into account and doesn’t try to impose a ‘one size fits all’ set of regulations.

“A huge salad bagging operation in California with greens from hundreds of farms going to a single packing house is very different from one-farm washing and bagging here in Pennsylvania. As far as organic certification is concerned, we already keep detailed records and have clear tracking systems in place. We’re ahead of the game in many ways.”

What Rosen said is of looming concern right now is that a large group of conventional agriculture and trade organizations, including the California and Arizona Farm Bureaus, United Fresh Produce Association, Western Growers and the Produce Marketing Association, among others, have petitioned the USDA to adopt a national marketing agreement.

These organizations are suggesting rules patterned after the Western Growers Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement (LGMA), what Rosen describes as an “overzealous” policy that encourages monoculture and is likely to shut small farmers out of direct sales to supermarkets.

“The program in California has resulted in negative environmental practices, causing destruction of vegetative buffers and wildlife habitat, reduction in biodiversity and [precluding] diverse operations that have a mixture of livestock and vegetables,” Rosen said.

Jim Crawford, owner-operator of certified organic New Morning Farm in Hustontown, Pa., sells direct-market produce in Pennsylvania and in Washington D.C.

“If buyers refuse to buy unless you follow rules they’ve created, what can you say?” Crawford asked. “I worry more about that than about legislation. The government has to be responsive to farmers and consumers. When these industries make up their own requirements, they bypass the democratic process.”

Crawford said such regulations are a long way from becoming law.

“I am not one of those people who thinks our adversaries are out to get us and are going to win if we don’t go to some extreme,” he said. “I personally believe the organic law turned out to be very reasonable, favorable and well-designed in the end.

“The good news is, people who support organic and local foods are very strongly opinionated and very vocal and won’t put up with any destructive or ridiculous rules. There are enough reasonable people in the government and outside the government to prevent that.”

What’s at stake is more than the right to grow, buy and sell food products. Recent years have seen a spate of food safety breaches and scares, from E. coli in packaged spinach to mercury in chocolate sauce.

Unscrupulous traders have knowingly put tainted products on the market. The FDA, gutted of staff and regulatory power over the past eight years and repeatedly accused of incompetence, corruption and negligence, has recently acquired a bioterrorism expert to lead it into this brave new century.

Unless Pennsylvanians want to stop eating foods that neither they nor their neighbors can produce—including orange juice, bananas, avocados, chocolate, coffee, rice, sugar and more—they depend, at least in part, on the national and global food safety systems.

Scale is the critical factor. When peanuts from large-scale processing plants in Texas and Georgia were found last year to be contaminated with salmonella, they were already being used in hundreds of branded and packaged products around the nation, including cakes, peanut butter, granola bars and ice cream. Dozens of these products were certified organic, carrying the federal USDA organic seal.

The credibility the organic movement had spent years to build in the national and international markets suddenly seemed to crumble. What had started as a network of dedicated small farmers “doing the right thing” in their local communities—still at the heart of the organic community—was being undermined by problems with and public perceptions of large-scale markets.

“The very strength of modern agribusiness—its ability to produce, process, distribute and mass-market huge quantities of cheap food—becomes a weakness when salmonella-tainted products can appear overnight on grocery store shelves across the country,” said Snyder and Scott Exo in a joint statement issued by PASA and the Food Alliance of Portland, Ore.

“A lot of risks come with foods being shipped long distances, moving through many hands,” Snyder said. “This wide-spread distribution system is the source of our safety problems. Food becomes anonymous.”

Take, for example, a hamburger purchased at the friendly neighborhood multinational fast food joint (one of the few types of businesses seeing increases in sales as a result of the recession).

The ground beef in that burger may contain particles of meat from hundreds of animals, multiple farms, perhaps from several states or even from different countries. The burger is anonymous; there is no single farm or a place where it originated.

With meat passing through countless hands, across state lines and international borders, ground together and distributed to multiple outlets, it’s a miracle the fast food industry maintains the level of safety it has.

This is where “scare” comes into play—the uncertainty of “what if?” If someone gets sick after eating a fast food hamburger, there are dozens of possible causes.

What if the beef wasn’t handled properly at the restaurant or at the warehouse or at the packing house? Or did it come from a sick animal back at the farm? What if it wasn’t the beef at all, but the ketchup, the mayo, the lettuce or the bread? What if the food handler’s hands were dirty? What if the customer’s hands were dirty? We can make ourselves sick just worrying about the risks.

A vast array of factors to consider can make federal agencies slow to identify the cause of the problem, as in the recent salsa scare, eventually traced to jalapeño and serrano peppers. Tomato growers lost millions of dollars when salsa contamination was initially (and falsely) attributed to tomatoes.

It’s not just contaminants and human error that threaten our food systems. The business motive to cut costs and increase profits, combined with the occasional but inconceivable lack of care for consumer safety, has caused numerous known and likely and many more unknown threats to food safety.

Perhaps the worst case of this occurred in 2007, when a Chinese company marketed toothpaste containing diethylene glycol, a component of antifreeze, because it was cheaper than the chemically similar vegetable glycerine commonly used as a toothpaste ingredient.

The toothpaste was for sale on grocery shelves in Latin America and was caught in the nick of time by the FDA in Miami, Puerto Rico and the port of Los Angeles. This and other food safety breaches from Chinese companies tarnished the reputation of all Chinese imports.

It’s easy to point the finger overseas, but American companies are not immune to charges of fraud and negligence. An ongoing federal lawsuit involving employees from SK Foods, a California-based supplier of bulk tomato paste and diced tomatoes used in salsa, ketchup and juices, is currently making its way through court.

While the company itself is not accused of wrongdoing, some employees are charged with offering bribes to purchasing managers at several of the country’s largest food companies, including Kraft and Frito Lay, and with introducing moldy and mislabeled tomato products to the market.

Compared to the industrial mass-distribution system, food safety problems on a local and regional level are few and far between. When they do happen, they are generally traced back to their sources and solved quickly.

PASA’s Snyder pointed out, “Food is not safer because it’s local per se, but the risk management issues are certainly more manageable.”

Local and regional foods don’t impact large populations all at once, which conceals the source of the problem. The “food police”—our local health inspectors, organic certification inspectors and state agricultural offices—seem to be doing a pretty good job.

That’s not to say that state and local officials are superheroes.

“A local jurisdiction somewhere in the state that might be understaffed or ineffective could have less violations to report, but that could be because of their ineffectiveness,” said Tom Kurtz, assistant manager for community service and acting director of Ordinance Enforcement and Public Health for the Borough of State College.

Kurtz’s jurisdiction includes Ferguson, Patton and College Townships.

“I’d say yes, we’ve had very few problems here,” he said. “We implemented ‘ServSafe’ protocol before it became statewide, so we’re actually a leader in that. A lot of people in the community have been trained. Any corrective orders our office issues are generally resolved quickly and appropriately.” ServSafe is a nationally-recognized food safety training certification.

Even on the local level, there’s always the “what if” to consider. Cronyism and bribes can be tempting, people make mistakes and the threat of bioterrorism is a real cause for concern.

Even before the economy took a nosedive, state and local agencies were chronically underfunded for years. In spite of the fact that state and local officials are the “eyes, hands and feet” of our food safety system, they still have no more say than the average consumer over national and international products and trade.

The FDA regulates most food as well as prescription and over-the-counter drugs, vaccines, medical devices and other products that account for about one-quarter of the U.S. economy. The scale of these products has so far proven to be too overwhelming even for the feds.

Moreover, our state food sector is not limited to farms and local or regional purveyors. Pennsylvania’s food systems include the headquarters of many large, internationally marketed food processing companies including Campbell Soup Company, Heinz, The Hershey Company, Kellogg Company, Kraft Foods Inc., M&M Mars, Quaker Oats Company and others.

Many consumers, even “local foodies,” buy favorite products now and then from these large companies. Food safety legislation must address the integration of rules for large, mid-sized and small operations, accommodating the needs of all three.

“People say not everyone can eat locally, but the fact is we’re falling far short of what we could be doing in that regard,” said PASA’s Snyder. “The local and regional foods movement is one of the best things to happen to agriculture in 50 years. Whatever happens with legislation, we need to make sure it does not negatively impact this very positive trend.”

New Morning Farm’s Crawford said: “If enough people get involved, this country’s not going to fall for something that’s destructive. It has to be talked about as part of the democratic process. The more it gets into the public sphere and not just in private industry, the better off we are.”

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Local farmers trying to grow hops for breweries

by Andy Gabriel

 

Photo by Andrew Beam

Hops vines reach for the sky at Mike Byers’ Potters Mills farm, Demeter’s Garden.

Imagine taking a seat at a local pub and enjoying a frosty beer brewed with hops grown right here in Centre County. Thanks to two area farmers, that dream may soon become a reality.

Mike Byers, of Potters Mills, and Scott Case, of Aaronsburg, began growing hops last year just to see if it could be done. Both farmers are expecting their first harvest in August, and plan to sell their hops to Elk Creek Café and Aleworks in Millheim.

Tim Yarrington, head brewer at the café, confirmed that the company is interested in buying hops from both Byers and Case. Hops provide bitterness, flavor and aroma to a beer and are essential to the brewing process.

The two farmers could be the first to grow hops commercially in the area.

Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture membership director Michelle Gauger said there are no hops farms that belong to PASA and she is not aware of any that exist in Centre County.

Yarrington did not know of any local hops farms until Byers and Case began planting last year.

The two hops farms are the newest addition to a growing movement that emphasizes locally grown foods.

Elk Creek Café already supports the “buy local” trend in other ways. It boasts that most of the food it serves is raised or grown locally, and that its beers are brewed on-site.

Yarrington said there are many advantages to buying local ingredients, and hops would be no exception. He said having a relationship with farmers is an advantage, since it allows him to know exactly what he is buying – what goes into the hops and, more importantly, what stays out.

Both farmers said they are growing their hops organically.

Currently, most of the café’s hops come from the Yakima Valley of Washington. That region yields about 75 percent of commercial hops production in the United States, according to Hop Growers of America, a national nonprofit that promotes the hop industry.

At least for the near future, it is unlikely that the local farms would become the sole source of hops for the café.

Case is growing 60 plants; Byers has 40 plants ready for harvest this year and another 40 that he said should be ready next year.

“We’re getting into this slowly,” Case said.

Though Case and Byers are each growing their hops independently, both farmers know each other and occasionally chat about hops.

One topic that is often discussed among farmers and brewers is price.

Yarrington said it will be interesting to see if buying local hops is cheaper than having them shipped from afar.

If hops follow the same pattern as other local foods, they may prove to be more expensive.

According to Case, the price of local crops is driven up because they are typically grown in smaller quantities. Yarrington agreed.

“It’s an economy of scale,” he said.

Every brewer has his own distinctive style and philosophy regarding the use of hops.

Yarrington said he prefers to blend a variety of hops into a single beer to create a unique, balanced taste.

“Each variety has a unique flavor component,” he said.

By planting nine varieties of hops between the two of them, Byers and Case may provide Yarrington with the assortment he is looking for.

Otto’s Pub and Brewery also may be getting into the local hops action.

Charlie Schnable, head brewer at Otto’s, said he is excited about the possibility of hops being sold in Centre County, though he has not been in contact with either Byers or Case yet.

Like Elk Creek Café, Otto’s uses hops grown in the Pacific Northwest.

Schnable added that it may be tough to grow hops in Pennsylvania because of the mildew problems associated with hops grown on the East Coast.

According to the national hop growers group, New York State was a hops hotbed in the late 19th century, but downy mildew devastated the region and hops production soon moved west.

Byers and Case have anticipated those problems and hope to avoid them.

Case said he is growing his hops on telephone poles to get them as high up as possible, hoping that better air circulation will help prevent mildew; Byers bought strains that are supposedly resistant to the fungus.

Case and his wife Eda own Patchwork Farm in Aaronsburg, where they grow organic vegetables, herbs and flowers. Byers owns Demeter’s Garden in Potters Mills and sells Lost Hollow Honey.

According to Byers, there are now others who are beginning to grow hops in the county, but he does not know any by name.

Hops are not the only ingredient that brewers must acquire outside of Pennsylvania. Grains, such as wheat and barley, are a major component in all beers and are not being grown in the area.

Schnable said most of the grains Otto’s uses in its beers are purchased from farms in Canada, Germany and England.

“I would love to see grains being grown locally,” Schnable said.

Though the existence of a beer made with strictly local ingredients is not yet possible in Centre County, Byers and Case are doing their part to take local residents one step closer to a homegrown brew.

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State parks to stay open—at least for now

by Jill Gomez

 

Photo by Jill Gomez

Whipple Dam had been one of the targeted parks in the initial information about park closures.

The fate of Whipple Dam State Park was hanging in the balance in early June, and environmentalists across central Pennsylvania were up in arms about it.

Pennsylvania’s House Appropriations Committee was debating Senate Bill 850, sponsored by Senate Republicans in response to Gov. Ed Rendell’s proposed budget and passed by the Senate on May 6.

If passed by the House as well, some 50 of Pennsylvania’s 117 parks would have faced the threat of a shutdown, nine of which rim the Mid State Trail in the state’s central region forests.

Closing 35 parks in response to a $26 million cut in the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) budget was just one solution to reduced funds under Bill 850. Schools, libraries, children’s services and roads could also have been affected.

Matt Brouillette, President and CEO of the Commonwealth Foundation, said during the appropriations meetings that “Senate Bill 850 spends only that which the state is projected to bring in from state revenues, plus federal stimulus money.”

In the same meeting, Sharon Ward, executive director of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, said, “The recession that is devastating Pennsylvania’s families is reflected in a dramatic decline in state tax revenue, which continues to fall behind projections.”

For April, this was almost a billion dollars below estimate.

Both sides agreed that something needed to be done to help balance the budget, but on June 8, the House Appropriations Committee voted down Bill 850 along party lines, 20 Democrats to 14 Republicans.

Those who opposed the bill are generally in favor of raising taxes, mostly for the top 5 percent of Pennsylvania’s income earners, and dipping into Pennsylvania’s Rainy Day Fund in an effort to avoid cutting back in program spending.

Joel Yoder runs a boat concession at Whipple Dam, providing rowboats and paddleboats so lake visitors can enjoy the calm waters there.

“The tourist industry is telling us that people affected by the economy will spend their vacations at parks this summer, closer to home,” Yoder said. “What if there were no parks?”

Yoder grew up visiting Whipple Dam and Greenwood Furnace, another park that faced possible closure. In 2000, he opened Rothrock Outfitters in Huntingdon, where he sells biking, kayaking and hiking equipment.

“To me, even thinking about closing the parks showed that no one cared,” he said. “Our representatives and senators should be held accountable. What other ideas had been considered? It was just a knee-jerk reaction.”

Christie Hall, who works at Doan’s Bones Barbeque on the corner of Route 26 and the entrance to Whipple Dam, also opposed the bill. At the height of the controversy, she brought a petition into the eatery for customers to read about the possible closing and encouraged them to sign it.

“Business has been slow, as if people think the parks here are already closed,” Hall said.

Anita Corvin, who bought the log cabin style restaurant with her husband Brendan in 2002 and expanded its dining facility last year, said she didn’t think Whipple Dam would close.

“To me, it’s one of the most beautiful parks in the area,” Corvin said. “People who work there take pride in keeping it up.”

Tor Michaels, chief of staff to Rep. Scott Conklin, stated that in the long run, park closings would end up costing the state more money than they would save and could have a ripple effect on the longevity of the parks that remain open.

Michaels said return clientele from neighboring states could have diminished, reducing tourist dollars. In addition, compensation to park employees losing their jobs would have cost the state $5 million, and there would have been an additional $3 to $5 million in lost revenues.

According to Michaels, Conklin did all he could to help avert the passing of the bill in appropriations meetings.

Even though Whipple Dam will remain open for now, the closing of any parks in Pennsylvania will have devastating effects on the rural communities dependent on park goers for business and livelihood.

Chris Novak, DCNR’s press secretary, echoed Michaels’ comments when she said that the closing of parks “would turn away more than 3 million visitors each year, and wipe out $57 million in visitor spending.”

“We’re not allowed to hire staff, and we’ve had to tighten our belts over the years,” Novak said, adding that the cuts would mean a huge amount of further job loss, as 70 to 80 percent of the DCNR budget is related to staff, including rangers, lifeguards, lawn tenders and bathroom cleaners.

If any parks are shut down as a result of future legislation, many of them would still be accessible by visitors; but without proper protection from rangers, vandalism of existing facilities and overall safety could become a concern. Maintenance would also discontinue to some 1,000 miles of roads that currently allow forest access.

Despite the defeat of Bill 850, which added $19 million in cuts to Gov. Rendell’s proposed $7 million slashing of the $100-plus million DCNR budget, the fate of the Pennsylvania budget remains in flux.

Republican Rep. Kerry Benninghoff said: “Ultimately, we need to devise a budget that’s less egregious to particular organizations and particular agencies that we fund. If we have to make cuts—and it appears we are going to have to—they ought to be done fairly, a little bit from everybody, so no one suffers tremendously.”

If Benninghoff has his way, that would be good news for park goers and the business owners that depend on them.

As Yoder of Rothrock Outfitters said, “If they close nearby parks, I would consider moving away. What would be the point of staying here?”

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College of Ag officials no help in revealing numbers

by Jenn Kight

 

Photo by Jenn Kight

Cows eat in the Free Stall barn at the Penn State Dairy Barns. Their diet of alfalfa is being studied as a way to reduce ammonia emissions from the cows.

Suppose a curious central Pennsylvania taxpayer is interested in knowing more about where Penn State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences gets its funding for research. It is, after all, a public land-grant university whose purpose is to serve the people of Pennsylvania; research on farming should certainly be available and helpful to the state’s agricultural workers.

But how much bureaucratic red tape and administrative run-around would a person have to work through until she finally got some real, meaningful numbers?

Quite a lot, it turns out.

First, one could try the Penn State Web site, www.psu.edu; this seems an obvious place to find information, perhaps by clicking on the “Research” tab. The link for “Grants Information” results only in a page that contains no grant dollar information.

And the link for “Corporate Connections?” Again, no dice. The page that comes up on that link claims that it is “a site to guide the corporate community in understanding the many ways Penn State collaborates with industry.”

Still another tab on the Research directory page, “Research News,” provides no information regarding research funding, neither who is researching what nor how much they are getting paid (in grant money) to do so.

Using the Penn State search engine, a keyword search for “funding” yields an online publication from Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences Human Resource Services and Staff Development, which shows a pie chart depicting the breakdown of funding sources for fiscal year 1999/2000, by percentages.

But what is the total dollar amount to which these percentages refer? And why is this information a decade old?

A series of telephone calls to various administrators in the College of Agriculture itself yielded absolutely no information. No one could--or would--say how much money was coming in, where it was coming from, who was getting the money or what they were researching with the money.

The College of Ag’s news coordinator Chuck Gill referred a Voices reporter to the Research Office at the college.

A receptionist in the Research Office then passed the buck to Grants and Contracts.

In a phone call to the Grants and Contracts office, a Voices reporter spoke with a woman who identified herself only as “Cheryl.” Cheryl told Voices that the office cannot provide any information on grants which the university’s premier college has received recently, saying only that they deal with “heavy-duty” grants.

Next, Voices was referred to Jillian Stevenson, associate director of communications and alumni relations for the College of Ag. Stevenson answered Voices’ requests for specific research projects and dollar amounts with an email listing only the College of Ag’s professors and their general research areas. There was no information regarding specific research projects, research grant amounts or funding sources.

Voices then tried the Grants and Contracts office once more, this time speaking with Kay Fetzer, coordinator of research and administrative services in the Grants and Contracts office of the College of Ag. In response to a request for dollar-amount information regarding grants, Fetzer said she would try to provide assistance “depending on the question.”

After then confirming that she would provide the names of all grant beneficiaries as well as specific dollar amounts, Fetzer failed to provide any information by the time Voices went to press.

The next option was to search other Web sites for the funding sources themselves, such as the U. S. Department of Agriculture.

A look at the page for the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program yielded a wealth of information, public information that any of the College of Ag’s administrators should have been able to give out.

According to SARE’s Web site, Penn State researcher faculty have received numerous grants for research projects; some of the most recent grants are for such projects as whole farm nutrient planning for organic farms, coordinated by Dr. Elsa Sanchez, an assistant professor of horticulture systems management at Penn State.

SARE granted the project over $96,000 with federal funds matching at over $55,000.

A second example is the $87,000 SARE grant for another project coordinated by Sanchez – a research project on sustainable Botrytis management. Non-federal matching funds add nearly $59,000 to the research funds.

The SARE online reporting system is clear and concise: a simple search engine yields results in terms of projects dated more recently, to ones completed in years past. In each result, one may view the funding amount, the participants, the project coordinator’s name, the coordinator’s office, email address, and telephone number. Also, the initial project abstract and subsequent annual reports are made available.

The curious taxpayer now knows more than anyone at the College of Ag about just what researchers are doing in the College of Ag.

Another option the curious taxpayer has is to call the researchers themselves. For example, a call to Dr. Mary Barbercheck, a leading researcher in the entomology department, proved fruitful.

According to Barbercheck, her recent research in organics has been funded by three separate grants. Her “ballpark” estimates put a first grant for a 4-year project around $500,000.

A second 4-year project was funded with $900,000, and a third four-year project that involves other institutions comes with a price tag of approximately $2.2 million. All three interdisciplinary projects are funded by the USDA, said Barbercheck.

Renae DePierre, a research technician for the weed science department at the college, said that her research under Dr. Bill Curran, a professor of weed science, is divided between trials of organic farming methods and conventional methods which focus on the efficacy of various commercially produced herbicides. DePierre added that while she is not privy to exact figures, in terms of grants most of the resaerch funding is from the USDA.

In the end, a taxpayer can find out where the bulk of funding comes from, but why did he have to jump through so many hoops? And why didn’t that information come from the officials at the College of Ag?