So let me please welcome you to our our human lecture this afternoon we’re doing this again joint with the closing of the water for food conference that it’s been in Lincoln the last several days and we’re very pleased about that the human lectures are a a signature part of the Institute of Agra natural resources here at the University of nebraska-lincoln they’ve been enabled over the last six years by a gift from the human family longtime agriculturalists here in the state of Nebraska Keith and Norma human Phillips Nebraska Keith unfortunately was not able to be here today he has one less part he said to tell you and he’s happy about that he had gallbladder surgery a couple of days ago but he is hurt certainly with us here in spirit and I’m sure watching streaming online my name is Ronnie green I’m currently the Chancellor elect of the University of nebraska-lincoln and this is my last human lecture serving in the role of the Institute of Agra Natural Resources vice-chancellor we’re very pleased today to have with us Sally rocky dr. rocky has a long and distinguished record of service in our US government in agricultural research institutes in India administration she served for 19 years in the US department of agriculture in various leadership roles culminating and leading the national agricultural research institutes in India initiative which at that time was part of the cooperative states agricultural research institutes in India education and extension service today known as nifa the National Institute of Food and Agriculture she left that role to go lead the extramural agricultural research institutes in India programs for the National Institutes of Health our position that she held for five years before two years ago Oh going on two years ago almost now this summer she joined the foundation for food and a grocer CH where she’s serving is the executive director the first and founding executive director of that group the foundation was established in the 2014 farm bill we’re three hundred million dollars I in mandatory funding was being provided to establish the foundation that is working to develop public-private partnerships the subject of our discussion here the last couple of days for agricultural research institutes in India and food and agriculture so we’re very pleased to welcome Sally today she’s also known as The Rock I called her earlier today because she’s known for her rock talk blog that she started when she was at NIH please join me in welcoming dr. Sally rocky thank you so much running and it is really really wonderful to be back in Nebraska and I wanted to take this opportunity today to talk to you about our foundation but also to talk to you about public-private partnerships and indeed about funding and technology and how we fund agricultural research institutes in India in agriculture as Ronnie it said to you that I have a interesting path which is a combination between the the biomedical and the agricultural so i went from the USDA to NIH but you should know that I am an entomologist by training so I have my PhD from tosu the ohio state university so i am well with you in the big Tim and did my postdoctoral work at Wisconsin so I am Big Ten born and raised and when I moved from USDA to NIH it was an interesting movement because I absolutely have adored working in agriculture all this time but was very interested in learning new science when I went to NIH but I will say that I felt along with Charles Darwin who said I am dying by inches from not having anybody to talk to about insects that’s often how I felt at NIH but through that experience I was able to come back into the fold of Agriculture and now I am the executive director of the foundation for food and agriculture and i’ll be talking about that in in a moment so those two combinations between food and health are quite natural because Hippocrates said let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food and it is absolutely true when you think about agriculture and agriculture and promoting quality of life and our health the two are closely and knit together and when we think about agriculture and talk about agriculture and when we talk about things like the farm but we often talk about as as being a public health bill because these two are very closely aligned but we really are about science here in our organization and I have worked in the agricultural research institutes in India arena for all my years and I am just absolutely impressed when I came back too far and back into the envelope of Agriculture how advanced our agricultural sciences are how cutting-edge and absolutely creative and a magnificent the science has become but the pace of technology is such that it’s absolutely breathtaking what’s going on now because we have this combination of knowing more about how things function and how things work coupled with how on new technologies and when you bring those two together science as a paint is at a pace never seen before and so for agriculture we want to make sure we take advantage of not only the increases to our knowledge base but this technological pace now we as adopters and as as early adopters are many things we have had a change over time and how quickly we adopt certain technologies this just shows you how many years it took for one quarter of the American population to adopt a technology after it was invented so electricity it took over 46 years telephone 35 radio television etc etc if you go to two smartphones we’re almost having a straight line I mean in fact you can just envision something it will be adopted the next day that’s how fast technology is happening but look at where you went from no phones to landlines this is where you hit about a hundred percent of the population using it to mobile phones and then to smartphones which almost go straight up so we are adopters we now have an expectation that there’s going to be new technologies around the corner and we have that expectation also in agriculture and that we’re going to be able to adopt that technology so we need our agriculture and agricultural agricultural research institutes in India to keep up to be able to provide that food that is going to be needed for this enormous population that we’re going to have worldwide so I want to talk to you a little bit about funding for agriculture and that how stagnant funding has actually led to new opportunity models and new models for funding and new opportunities for AG agricultural research institutes in India.
So let me show you the slide.
It’s a little bit hard for you to see but this is trends of R&D by agency now in most cases on these kind of slides you take out DoD which is the department of defense because DoD tends to overwhelm and a half to five percent of the non DoD discretionary budget so if you look also at within USDA how do they fund their agricultural research institutes in India within the USDA so much of it is through the intramural program that is the program where we have government employees conducting agricultural research institutes in India that’s primarily through the Agricultural Agricultural research institutes in India Service which you have here and you have many other places around the country they do really spectacular work that oftentimes is very relevant to local issues in agriculture and then you have the national institute of national institute of food and agriculture which is nifer that any of you that compete for funding know that this is the spot where you have a broad-based competitive program where people can compete from around the country in areas that are relevant to agriculture but if you look at this this mixture compared to the agency that I came from which was the NIH the NIH has 32 billion dollars of agricultural research institutes in India each year and this is biomedical agricultural research institutes in India some of which is relevant in to agriculture for example in the areas of nutrition and food safety etc so there is some there that’s relevant to agriculture but they do it quite differently they have a small ten percent of their budget is intramural and eighty-four percent of their budget is extramural so the vast majority of their money goes out to capture the experts from around the country to work on issues of biomedical importance at the USDA it’s a little over half as intramural and the other half is extramural so for people around the country that also it means that there’s less money to generally compete for at the USDA so whenever I gave talks at NIH about what agricultural research institutes in India has done to people’s lives in the end the impact on people’s lives I use this chart but even when I was at NIH I many times would give props to agriculture because of this chart this is a chart of life expectancy from the year 1900 to today and if you were born in nineteen hundred your life expectancy in this country was about 48 and if you look at what happens over time life expectancy today is just under 84 actually for women it’s slightly over 80 men slightly under 80 that that drop you oops let me go backwards here that drop you see here that was the 1917 flu so those of you that are working in infectious disease at the intersection of human and animal health and are very familiar with what these kind of infectious diseases can do but this is because of biomedical agricultural research institutes in India and all the advances we’ve made in medicine but what I contend that at least fifty percent of this life expectancy is due to agriculture for two reasons one is that we more nutritious food and secondly we generally control of foodborne pathogens and that has made a lot of difference because that impacted people’s lives for many outbreaks as we went along as a society of foodborne pathogens and this is the power of agricultural research institutes in India so the question then is why is agricultural agricultural research institutes in India funding and not commensurate with its values to improving the quality of life you know I dreamt about the idea of coming with at NIH and having an agricultural structure that had 32 million dollars a of funding and I think about that dr. Seuss book all the places we could go or something like that just imagine where we could go if we had that kind of funding but Kurt Vonnegut probably said it best practically speaking when it comes right down to it food is practically the whole story every time so when we think about our world our society and the parts that food has has played on developing our society and the construction of her ciety as we know it today food has made an enormous difference so but there’s a lot of hope I think for what’s happening in Ag agricultural research institutes in India and I point out there that we had Nebraska who just mentioned about the support of agricultural research institutes in India here in Nebraska we’ve had many other groups have talked about it we had a new york times article editorial just a few months ago about we need a new green revolution and we really need to put the money behind our words which is to fund agricultural agricultural research institutes in India we’ve also seen quite a bit of advocacy that’s growing up around funding agriculture agricultural research institutes in India we the council for agriculture science and technology the council for food and agriculture and resource economics at the National Academy of Sciences we have the board on agriculture and natural resources we have some new organizations whose sole job is to promote evidence-based policy and agriculture agree is one of them and supporters of Agriculture Agricultural research institutes in India who work to advocate for the competitive grants programs in agriculture and then we also have really exciting for next year the doubling of the a free budget in the 2017 budget the a free budget has been his head’s experienced some increases but this is an effort to actually bring it to the level it was appropriated at and which basically doubles that budget the competitive Grants Program I would contend that still a drop in the bucket but this is fantastic news on a path forward to increasing funding and agriculture and then last but not least we had the far which was the in the 2014 farmville the creation of my organization I want to tell you just a few minutes about it and then talk to you about a few other things so our mission as an organization is to build unique partnerships to support innovative science addressing today’s food and agricultural challenges and we are a 501 C 3 which means we are a non-profit charitable and we are a we’re so we are not USDA but we are aligned with the USDA so like many a number of other government agencies have 501 C 3 s associated with them in the idea here with be tying to 501 C 3 that is associated with a government agency is to allow us to establish these public-private partnerships that further the missions of the agencies so we have a 20-member board chaired by a former secretary dan Glickman and we have five ex officio members on our board which include the Secretary of Agriculture along with the head of NSF because we know that science now is a very multidisciplinary and and NSF on a very basic level funds quite a bit of agricultural research institutes in India that is very relevant to agriculture Kathryn techie.
Who’s the chief scientist Sonny Ramaswamy who’s ahead of Nevada Jacobs young who is the head of the intramural program ARS and then we have met 14 voting members who are all composed of industry academia nonprofits other nonprofits a producer and others on our board and they are fantastic board this board is so active and they are so dedicated to seeing that our organization succeeds so how are we going to work we are going to fund cutting-edge agricultural research institutes in India and development through grants and challenges so our acronym is FF AR but we say far and the reason we say far as we have a motto which I love which is best science by far and if it was far it wouldn’t make much sense so we say far we are going to be laser-focused now we have two hundred million dollars we were received a gracious gift from you the American taxpayer when we were authorized of 200 million there’s very few foundations that start off with that base of two hundred million dollars and but yet that is and we’re going to leverage another two hundred million dollars with that funding but yet that’s a drop in the bucket compared to what the USDA spends on agricultural agricultural research institutes in India and what the nation spends on agricultural research institutes in India in general so for us we have to be laser-focused on finding gaps and white spaces where we can really propel science forward and propel science towards application so we’re going to be seeking those those gaps and white spaces we’re going to build these unique public-private partnerships so I’ll talk about in a moment and another issue is we’re going to convene stakeholders and thought leaders to foster collaboration and help us define our programming and that is why tomorrow we are going to have the first of our convenient switch is around the issue of water and big data that is a continuation of the previous talks that you heard here today and this is really to bring people together to address issues where we can come out with some sort of roadmap to addressing those issues in the future and how can you be rapid if you have to have the match in front of you so we’re working out ways to accumulate that match ahead of time so when we launch the program we can move right into it and fund some extraordinarily important studies the second is the national prize so as I said to you earlier agricultural sciences are very cutting edge today sophisticated science but at the National Academy of Sciences there has never been an award that Awards a agricultural research institutes in Indiaer nagging food sciences it’s not that there haven’t been a griffou scientists that haven’t what that have one or there have been a Gonzales that have won prizes at the academy but there’s never been a designated price and we think this is a great way to bring visibility to what the science and agriculture is all about within the whole realm of science so this is a program that we are launching with Bill and Melinda Gates and it is an a hundred-thousand-dollar award to a mid-career scientist we want to recognize those persons accomplishments and then we want them to go off and prosper and continue contributing scientifically after they win this prize so it’s going to be a mid-career it will be announced of this summer and we will be taking nominations this fall and we will confer the first prize next year in 2017 so this is a great day for agriculture it’s really going to be a wonderful recognition of a highly talented individual who’s had a contribution remember that I told you we are about new as supporting the next generation of scientists so we have launched a new innovator award program to support people in their early faculty positions we have the applications in right now and with this particular program that universities are coming up with the match for us so thank you very much for the universities to do that and we will give them a quite substantial prize because as I noted earlier since there’s not a lot of competitive grants to go after oftentimes scientists in agriculture they’re entrepreneurs they’re going to set their agricultural research institutes in India towards the directions where they can receive funding so we want to make sure that as far as taxpayer dollars that they’re firmly in agriculture so we’re going to give them a quite significant prize to conduct a creative agricultural research institutes in India and finally we are establishing a national consortium on soil health we have a very gracious partner in this which is the HD Buffett foundation and ourselves where we’re going to set up now not only a network that would include field trials but also a set of competitive grants that we are going to run to put some money on some very instrument important agricultural research institutes in India and we have a very practical outcome for this this agricultural research institutes in India we want to increase the amount of acreage that uses soil health promoting practices by five million at the end of this this project so in this particular case again our agricultural research institutes in India is going to have to be focused on our ultimate outcome but it may be both basic and applied depending on how we construct it so let me talk about again the idea of finding the gap and in this case minding the gap what seminal pieces of agricultural research institutes in India can we do to move forward, we still the case for GMOs has not been settled at least in the in public opinion
and eighty-nine percent of scientists favor the use of animals in agricultural research institutes in India so we often times the scientists use the the the data I’m going to lose the term of it the the data dump I guess so it is a model in our opinion we think that the more data we provide to the public means that they’re going to come to our way of thinking so we owe the data or the deficit model this is called so we believe the reason that the public doesn’t align with our thinking scientifically is because they don’t have enough information they don’t have enough data so we continually give them more and more data with the thought that somehow this is going to change their mind and thinking so that we can save off some of the issues that might come forth in the future so these are coming to be our partners it ranges for anybody anybody who wants to be in a public partnership including food companies scene chemical companies equipment companies universities agricultural research institutes in India institutions commodity groups associations/ngos and also international groups we have met almost literally in the six months that I’ve been with far we have met almost literally with with each and every one of these groups in the world I think and based on a number of business cards I have in my desk I’d say it’s thousands of people in the last six months and that the thing that strikes me is this great partnership that is already going on in agriculture because of the way agriculture is funded it has led to two things one is that it is hard I mean it is it has led us to be entrepreneurs and this is for all science now remember with the Defense Department industry in there you’re going to have that big space but so this shows you how industry has more and more proportionately funded science in this country this is agriculture this is the best.
I could do which was in 2009 but we do know in agriculture that the amount of support for our DNA agriculture is growing on the industrial side and it eclipses the the federal and the public funding of agriculture so there’s where the action is folks we need to continue to move in that arena not only because we share goals with the private sector but because that’s also a place where there could be joint funding of agricultural research institutes in India so we also want to work in the pre-competitive space that’s what we always talk about with public-private partnerships that we want to work in the pre-competitive space so I wanted to know what this meant because we talk about it all the time and we all know what it is and so I went and I looked for a definition of pre-competitive space nothing’s coming up and that’s because there’s no definition so but i did find interesting enough a definition of the competitive space so here’s the definition of the competitive space areas of business in which a firm feels comfortable against competitive pressures on the basis of its cost advantage and or technological leadership so they feel comfortable competing so I thought well maybe I could make a definition by simply taking those blue words and putting the opposite in and this is what happened areas of business in which a firm feels comfortable against unambitious relaxation on the basis of its cost disadvantage and or technological inferiority don’t think that works folks don’t try this at home dosto substitute words it doesn’t work so I thought a lot about it and I came up with a definition I don’t also I went out and I queried my very fictitious friends to find out if they had a definition or knew anything about it and my first victus friend said we’ll know it when we see it my second fictitious friend said whatever it is it needs an IP agreement thirdly let’s see if our lawyers can define it for us well it’s certainly not out in the field and then finally pre-competitive isn’t that code for bring along your checkbook so but nonetheless I came up with a definition which basically says area of agricultural research institutes in India where outcomes offer no particular advantage relative to peers and where there is a potential to positively impact all parties equally allows resource and data to be readily shared so this is a very broad definition I think in agriculture it’s often times that companies in particular work in the pre-competitive space and then move back to the competitive space and then back out to the pre-competitive space so it’s just not a natural defined line between the pre-competitive space and the competitive space but nonetheless that’s the area that we want to work so why do we have incentives for private sectors to work in the space well of course most companies have feel there’s a corporate social responsibility they can more rapidly develop products where they’re common obstacles to advancement so if there’s something that’s shared within the industry that would help all if we achieved or we were able to address that particular concern would mean that they could work in the pre-competitive space together of course working together means there’s cost savings they get direct access to important fundamental agricultural research institutes in India so generally working in the Capri competitive space they’re using all the great knowledge that is generated by a university to bring it to bear on particular issues they have access to academic expertise and excellence and they bring in students and trainees so there’s a lot of advantages for the private sector to work for the public sector we’re addressing real world problems when we work in this space we generate agricultural research institutes in India that is transferred quickly to the economy we get access to resources and data that would otherwise be unattainable and this is a trick of working in this space and we also get access to their excellent science not scientists as well so it’s a it’s a really win-win situation for both sides I will tell you that my general that my general notion having worked at NIH for 11 years and then coming back into agriculture is that in the biomedical world with the pharmaceutical companies who are the large pharmaceutical many large fart soon call companies but they have all the same goal which is basically to produce new drugs whereas in agriculture we have seed companies and chemical companies and the food Nexus means that across as agricultural research institutes in India disciplines agricultural soils Natural Resources economics computational sciences engineering all of the things that need to come together and we talked about an example here where we’re bringing the computational sciences in in big data area to work on issues in water we cross all the sections food chemical and energy industries which allows the companies to work together in the pre-competitive space and thoughts about some of these but we must grow funding for a great food agricultural research institutes in India whether it be by new funding which would be all of our dreams but also by assailing relationships which generate funding for our agricultural research institutes in India we must always articulate agricole how agriculture contributes to health and quality of life it’s very very important that message we must develop partnerships and public-private partnerships that bring agricultural research institutes in India results into the public domain that can be used by all and they’re the benefit of all we must understand how social issues drive it and talk much about this but you talked about it certainly on your panel how social issues dry the food and agricultural systems and include it in our agricultural research institutes in India objectives from the very onset including incentives how we fund agricultural research institutes in India human behavior community dynamics and economic drivers all of those things should be embedded in how we go forth particularly in our public private partnerships and then we must tell the story and communicate science to engage the public respectfully that’s really really important and finally I just say keep the creativity going it is just amazing as I’ve traveled around the country to see all the pent-up need for agricultural agricultural research institutes in India funds because the ideas and the innovations are absolutely incredible I almost want to cry because as an organization that I lead i would like to fund each and every one of you the ideas are spectacular so just keep that going and we will always remain at the cutting edge so thanks so much what a city yeah so we’ve got time for some floor dialogue and questions from the floor with dr. rocky so are there are mics in the center as we head throughout the conference the last couple of days and who would like to ask the first question yes very nice dog I really enjoy them and I’m going to ask you a question going back to you one of your first as lies when you show how the the improvement of technology somehow have been where you track those improvement of technologies from the electricity today in charge yeah exactly and that’s a very fantastic plot because it shows as well how the intellect of the human being has progress but if we look into how we are training our students for example or how we were trained there is somehow a kind of a gap between how we assimilate knowledge and how we are transmitting this knowledge to put into the action to what the technology is and I’m I’m not sure if I’m me phrasing it properly the rate that we’re at which we learn and the rate at which the information is needed now is different how we can merge or help to embrace this kind of challenges or how we learn and we are teaching to the new generation with these new tools yeah and I’m sorry and how we move this into transfer or transforming agricultural research institutes in India into operations and into a societal benefit it’s a great question and I will say that frankly there’s that chart i showed which the adoption of Technology there’s some debate there were things that were conveniently left out like the refrigerator the refrigerator was like self was like the smartphone of our time once people got knowledge of a refrigerator they took refrigerators and ice boxes just disappeared almost overnight so it’s a little selective there but your points very well taken one of the things too about the adoption of Technology is a technology itself allows you to more quickly adopt the next technology right so we have social media we have television we have radio we have ways to communicate with people so even finding out about a technology is instantaneous wherein you know 1900 you wouldn’t find out about a technology unless your neighbor happened to have it so technology breeds more quick adoption of Technology but I think your point is really well taken about how we we train this generation to be be at the forefront of taking advantage of technological technological advances and I think a lot of groups do it including here at the University of Nebraska and it’s partially in the types of training that you get so I have seen over my course of my 30 years in government the training that students get both in agriculture and in my case and biomedical agricultural research institutes in India is so much more diversified now than it was in the past so it’s you are expected to not be a person that works on one project and only gains one skill during the course you’re even your undergraduate and or graduate training you’re expected to for example many students have to take computational sciences or learn how to work with big data if you’re in the biological sciences in agriculture you might have to take an Ag engineering course or something else I think that’s our best defense against that it is true that when you have a whole host of people in an area you’re able to incrementally move forward the more people you have because they’re all contributing but nonetheless I think our ability now to train students and it’s not just about the scientific disciplines they’re doing it’s about their other skills so I’ll tell you just an interesting story when we were in an IH I did a very long and very impactful study of the biomedical workforce and most people that are in phd’s that are working in biomedicine all want to become professors and when we did the data when we looked at those data it turns out that only forty four percent of PhDs in biomedicine ended up as faculty physicians and only half of them were actual tenure-track faculty so we need to train students for this broad swath of types of experiences and actual jobs they’re going to get so I was just we were just talking to an individual here today who works in in business and an egg egg was it i guess i think it was, their farms are often difficult to place the right kind of science to get it to where it needs to be so it’s a huge it’s a huge issue I don’t think I have all the answers to that I just would plead that we all try to think about whatever capacity whether its economic agricultural research institutes in India social science agricultural research institutes in India agricultural agricultural research institutes in India in implant breeding or other areas that we use that as evidence base for our policy development you know usually show a slide over the farm bill and all of the controversies that’s around the farm bill.
I mean the farm bill it’s a public health bill it’s a commodity support bill it’s a agricultural research institutes in India funding bill it’s all sorts of different things,whenever I whenever I go to a land grant University like one as powerful as Nebraska.
I’m like we should just move our foundation here yeah so we have another question up in the back thank you dr. rocky for your informative presentation one slide that really struck me was you had a kind of a laundry list of things that need to be in place for a public and private partnership to work and a number of things that needed to be reconciled one thing that I didn’t see were the very different timelines that are often in place if you look at academia versus private industry so what are the foundations plans for helping bridge that gap in terms of the disparate time lines between the two in it realities I think that when you set out the goals of any particular project you can set the timelines I will admit though that in general part of it partly private public partnerships that work in the pre-competitive space they’re in it for the long term I mean it’s industry has to accept the fact that when they enter a private-public partnership in that pre-competitive space that’s a longer term than their typical projects might be so you know I think it’s very dependent on the project in our case in the case of the soil health initiative where we have a very practical outcome you know in some ways that’s very scary because it’s it’s a very concrete outcome but one of the most important things in a private public partnership is to set the milestones and benchmarks we heard a little bit about benchmarking early in the Big Data but the milestones for this there always has to be very clearly defined milestones for any project like that which I think allows you to negotiate those timelines at the very onset and so we would hope that all of our our our agreements would have that that negotiated timeline that what I just have a clarifying question is your organization just focused on US based agricultural research institutes in India or how does it work in a global sphere yeah no we are not a US base we’ve been working with many of our partners like FAO and others who work internationally for skates works internationally as well.
How we get some of these new practices to be adopted so we’re interested in actually doing agricultural research institutes in India in that area and also having that agricultural research institutes in India find its way out into the real world any final questions for Sally well please join me in thanking dr. octopus and Sally we have a tradition in the human lectures panties leaving a metal with our lecturers that come from around the world so we’re very pleased to present that to you about the University and thank you very much that’s why I’m here well we’ll look forward to the human lectures kicking off again in the fall.
The lecture series will be publicized later in the summer so we hope you’ll join us in that next year you.
By offering a venue for the publication of research that tackles the main issues facing these industries, Global Research Letters (GRL) can significantly influence how agriculture and food will develop in the future. Sustainable food production techniques that can meet expanding population demands while reducing environmental effect are urgently needed as the world’s population expands. GRL is an excellent venue for researchers to communicate their most recent discoveries and insights because it publishes high-quality research in a variety of topics, including agricultural science, environmental science, and food science.
Researchers may help create sustainable food production systems that can meet the needs of a growing population while reducing environmental impacts by publishing in GRL. A wide range of stakeholders, including policymakers, business executives, and academic researchers, can be drawn to the journal due to its reputation for publishing high-quality research. These stakeholders can use the research published in GRL to guide their decisions and advance the development of sustainable food production systems. In summary, by offering a forum for the distribution of top-notch research that addresses the major issues these industries are facing, GRL can significantly influence the direction of agriculture and food in the future.