Financing Agricultural Economics Research and Extension in the Southern Region

Each year, heads of agricultural economics as the number of SY's in the biological and departments meet to discuss mutual issues physical sciences in 1940-41, but the proporrelated to our teaching, extension, and retion was only 10.8 percent in 1970-71. search programs. A major continuing issue is Halvorson [1, p. 18] summarized his concerns our portion of research and extension fundsabout the funding situation as follows. with a natural suspicion that we are not being allocated our "fair share." An additional, and "It is paradoxical that in spite of the growperhaps larger, concern has arisen in the last ing importance of economic problems in our few years as we recognize the apparent society, and in spite of research legislation movement toward increasing use of emphasizing the importance of sociocompetitive grants for funding agricultural reeconomic problems, budgets of agricultural search. It is not the grants idea that concerns economics departments have not increased us as much as it is the research areas which relatively. They have been nevertheless forced have been developed and/or may be developed by the necessity of the times, to take on new within which we must make our proposals. problem areas outside of commercial agriculEach department in a university draws its ture. sustenance from the same pie. Each is con"I should point out that the 20 percent cerned with the size of the pieces devoured by Hatch marketing requirement resulted in animal science, crop science, and the others. some grotesque distortions of research proThe following comments relate to both share grams of agricultural economics departments. and "pie enlargement." These could largely have been avoided had I cite some of the pertinent literature on this funds for farm management, land economics, subject, review some federal legislation having and rural development been increased in line a bearing on the topic, discuss some data on with needs. However, this would have meant historical trends, comment on the possible a larger share of station funds for economics." reasons for the apparent trends, examine the competitive grants issue, and speculate a bit Halvorson's thesis is that funds for about the future. increased research in marketing, natural resources, and rural development have been squeezed out of funds which should have been SOME PAST WORK used for research on the economics of commercial agriculture. There seems to be some eviConcern about agricultural economics' apdence to support his thesis. parent decline over time in its share of experiment station and extension service funding is not new. Our friends in CSRS (now CR)-Glenn FEDERAL FUNDING Smith and Lloyd Halvorson [1, 6, 7]-pointed out this phenomenon. Smith [7] enumerated Federal funding for experiment stations and the many federal acts which were supposed to extension services is important. Approxiencourage social science research and went on mately one-fourth of our research funds are to show that agricultural economics research from federal sources and about one-third of our as measured by SY's had not grown in a relaextension funding comes from the federal govtive sense. For example, he noted [5, p. 5] that ernment. Thus, it is important to consider the number of agricultural economists refederal funding in considering our past and ceiving station funds was 11.0 percent as large future resources.