STATEMENT OF T. C. BYERLY, ADMINISTRATOR, COOPERATIVE STATE RESEARCH SERVICE, ON COOPERATIVE STATE RESEARCH SERVICE

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, we appreciate this opportunity to meet again with your committee for discussion of the work of the State agricultural experiment stations and schools of forestry and the role of the Cooperative State Research Service.

Dr. Brady has informed you of the change in name of our agency and the reason for it. However, Federal-grant support for the State experiment stations administered through our office has been continuous since 1888.

PROPOSED 1965 BUDGET

Funds requested for CSRS amount to $42.46 million. million is requested for research authorized by the Hatch Act.

An increase of $1.5

It is proposed that the disbursement of funds under section 204 (b) of the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946 be discontinued for fiscal year 1965.

The funds available for grants in support of the sciences basic to forestry are recommended to continue at the 1964 level of $1 million.

We are also requesting an increase of $32,000 for increased pay costs of Federal employees.

STATE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATIONS RESEARCH

In 1963 the State stations expended $172 million for research. Our Federalgrant support of $36.7 million augmented and attracted more than $136 million of additional support, a ratio of $3.70 in non-Federal funds for every $1 of Federal-grant funds.

These figures do not include State appropriations for buildings and other facilities that are utilized and shared by station research personnel.

State station scientists received individual grants of about $20 million from Federal agencies other than the U.S. Department of Agriculture for support of special competence to carry out related research. I am prepared to discuss this later in some detail, if you so desire.

The research of the experiment stations is conducted under about 13,000 projects dealing with all phases of agriculture and rural problems. The results of the research were disseminated in over 114 million copies of popular and technical reports, bulletins, and journal articles.

The fact that the State stations, located in the 50 States and Puerto Rico and consequently subjected to a diversity of demands, have evolved in a system whereby each station now demonstrates a high degree of research excellence and competence in one or more areas of agricultural science relating to its geographical setting, accounts for their unique capacity for research response to practical needs.

All State agricultural experiment stations develop their research programs in response to the research needs in the respective States within the stations' limits of funds facilities, and research investigators available. Research in the stations consists of about 65 percent of applied research directed to the solution of problems important in the respective States and assumed to be feasible of solution through research application of existing knowledge in the many sciences basic to agriculture. About 35 percent of the research in the State agricultural experiment stations is basic research designed to produce new knowledge in the sciences basic to agriculture, new knowledge to be used for the solution of problems where existing knowledge in the basic sciences is inadequate. Basic research in the State agricultural experiment stations is generally undertaken precisely because applied research on problems has revealed gaps in knowledge which must be filled in order to solve the problem.

CONCENTRATION OF RESEARCH EFFORT

None of the State agricultural experiment stations has sufficient resources to work on all the problems confronting agriculture in every State at the same time. State agricultural experiment station directors and their colleagues must select problems for priority attention and concentrate the station's resources on the selected problems. Every station is currently reviewing its program, individually and in cooperation with other experiment stations in each of the four experiment station regions and with USDA agencies. Each station will designate research

areas in which it will concentrate a major portion of its efforts. This joint and continuing identification and concentration of research effort will strengthen research quality, relevance, and productivity. It will be a bulwark against duplication. Every State agricultural experiment station and each USDA agency will be informed as to what areas of research concentration have been identified and where. Cooperation among the stations and the U.S. Department of Agriculture will help to further strengthen our presently effective Federal-State agricultural research programs.

Research concentration takes account of commodities, problems, facilities, and people to do the research. Concentration of research resources has five interrelated aspects. These are: (1) Concentration within the station; (2) concentration through cooperation with other stations, as in regional research; (3) concentration through cooperation with USDA research agencies; (4) concentration through complementary use of funds from other public and from private agencies; and (5) concentration through cooperation with research units of the parent university administratively apart from the agricultural experiment station.

BASIS FOR CONCENTRATION

As background for the problem of research concentration, we have a few maps which show some broad areas of common research interest among the States and some striking differences. One inescapable basis for identifying areas in which a station must concentrate its efforts is that of the principal farm commodities which are sold for cash in the State. We have prepared five maps which show, in order, the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth farm commodity in each State for 1962. The data used are from FIS-191, "Supplement to the Farm Income Situation for July 1963," issued by the Economic Research Service.

Cash receipts from sale of cattle and calves ranks first in 20 States, dairy products in 11, cotton in 5, broilers in 4, tobacco in 4, wheat in 2, and oranges and sugarcane, 1 each. Second ranking adds seven more commodities; eggs in five States, soybeans in two, and sheep and wool, pineapples, greenhouse and nursery products, potatoes, and corn each in one State. The third ranking commodity list adds apples, hay, barley, grain sorghum, and rice; the fourth adds forest products, dry beans, and flax. The fifth ranking commodity list adds grapes, cranberries, and fur animals each in one State.

These five maps show at once the diversity of commodity importance and therefore the necessary diversity of commodity-oriented research programs in the several States. At the same time, they show the outstanding importance of a few commodities in many States.

BEEF AND DAIRY

Cattle and calves rank among the first 5 commodities in 43 States. Sales of cattle and calves brought cash receipts of more than $8 billion in 1962-more than 22 percent of all cash receipts. The State agricultural experiment stations spent a total of more than $10 million on research on beef cattle in 1963, the largest amount spent on any one commodity group. Dairy products appear among the first 5 commodities in 46 States. Cash receipts from dairy products amounted to more than $4.8 billion in 1962, the second ranking commodity in terms of cash receipts. Dairy research received about $8.3 million in research support in the State agricultural experiment stations during 1963, second only to beef cattle.

In order to coordinate their research and to avoid duplication, the States cooperate with one another and with USDA agencies in several regional research projects related to beef and dairy problems. There are six regional beef cattle projects.

The 3 regional beef cattle breeding projects have strong participation by the Agricultural Research Service as well as by 36 of the State agricultural experiment stations. These projects are highly productive. They have established the substantial and independent heritability of several important economic traits, including meat quality traits and rate of gain in weight. They have provided beef cattle producers sound guidelines for improvement of quality and efficiency of their herds through breeding.

Our present beef cattle research program needs acceleration in several areas; among these is an increase in basic research in physiology of reproduction designed to provide means of increasing the percentage calf crop. Several respiratory diseases are still poorly understood, too.

Our traditional method of beef production consists of the use of pasture and range to support cow herds for the production of feeder calves and yearlings. Traditionally, these feeder cattle have gone to Corn Belt farm feedlots for fattening.

Recently, commercial feedlots have increased rapidly in areas outside the Corn Belt.

Land prices and labor costs have risen, while prices of feed grains have decreased during the past 10 years. It's much cheaper to transport a ton of grain a thousand miles than to feed equivalent as hay. So we must determine feasibility, then relative costs of producing our feeder calves near the feedlot, and the feasibility and relative costs of feeding grain and concentrate to the near exclusion of roughage in the feedlot. We're by no means sure of the outcome. We must also give more attention to the three-fourths of a billion acres of range and pasturelands unsuited to production of cultivated crops. Economic production of beef on these vast areas may involve no or very limited feedlot feeding. But in any case, research at the North Carolina Experiment Station is demonstrating that we can feed cattle on all concentrate rations. They have obtained very favorable feed-grain ratios and have been able to avoid bloat and founder through careful feedlot management.

Increased efficiency of production by ruminants is essential for a continuing low-cost supply of animal products and economic stability in the livestock industry. A key to the solution of this problem is an understanding of the basic nutrient requirement of the ruminant and of the factors controlling feed utilization. Dr. Gennard Matrone, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Animal Nutrition in the North Carolina Experiment Station, is attacking this problem through the development of purified diets. This permits a study of the effect of specific dietary factors on the metabolic pathways forming volatile fatty acids in the rumen of the animal. Studies are being conducted to determine how the several bacterial fermentations influence one another.

There are regional dairy projects in each of the four experiment station regions; marketing projects in all four regions; breeding projects in the northcentral and southern; projects on breeding failure in the northeastern and western; and one on milk composition in the northeastern. The genetic improvement of our national dairy herd in milk production capacity is steady and substantial. Dairymen and public continue to be concerned over the value of milk fat in the human diet. Milk production, like beef production, tends to increasing use of concentrates because of their lower transportation and handling costs than hay.

GENETICS AND CYTOLOGY OF COTTON

Cotton is the most important cash crop grown in the United States. Among the commodities sold for cash, it is first in returns in 5 States, second in 5, and third, fourth, or fifth in 4 more, a total of 14. There are nine regional projects related to cotton.

Regional project S-1, "Genetics and Cytology of Cotton," is one of the most productive regional projects. Participation of the Cotton Branch of ARS has been of outstanding value. The Mississippi State Agricultural Experiment Station is the center for genetic stocks of potential breeding worth. Working in close cooperation with USDA and the other stations cooperating in regional project S-1, Mississippi scientists developed strain 1514 which entomologists found to be very promising for resistance to bollworm, cabbage looper, and the cotton leafworm. A 22-acre increase in Mexico will allow wide-scale testing in 1964. Cytogenetic research is largely centered at the Texas station. This and other genetic information developed by the agencies cooperating in S-1 is of great and increasing value to cotton breeders and producers.

In seeking improvement of economic traits of cotton, southern station scientists demonstrate unique and imaginative approaches in methods and techniques. Work is being done at the Tennessee station by a research team under the leadership of Dr. Hertel on the structure and physical changes along the length of a single cotton fiber by using the infrared transmission variations at various wavelengths. An infrared laser will be used as a source because of its extremely sharp focus for single frequencies emitted. The Tennessee team is studying also the attenuated total reflectance method of infrared spectroscopy to determine its usefulness in examining cotton fibers. The ATR has been found to be an excellent method of examining most films on the infrared spectrometer. Cotton fibers may be studied only after tuning (adjusting critically) the ATR to a double beam spectrometer since the intensity of absorption is slight.

Stripper cotton production

On the production side of cotton the same type of special competences are available at certain stations to apply scientific imagination to field practices. For an example, I would like to mention the concentration of effort on two major problems at the Arkansas station-stripper cotton production and seed cotton storage.

One of the objectives of the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station's research program on cotton is to reduce cost of production in order to make cotton fiber more competitive with synthetic fibers. Arkansas cottongrowers pay from 6 to 10 cents per pound of lint to harvest cotton. It is estimated that use of mechanical strippers to harvest cotton would reduce these costs to 3 cents per pound of lint. At the present time there are no stripper cotton varieties adapted to the delta area of Arkansas. A cooperative USDA-Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station project on development of stripper varieties was begun several years ago, and, at the present time, the feasibility of producing certain strains of promising stripper lines is being tested under Arkansas conditions. A stripper variety should be well adapted to either buckshot or the terrace soils of the State. There are about 500,000 such acres in the State. Agronomists C. A. Moosberg and B. A. Waddle are developing and running trials on new stripper strains. Agricultural engineers Tupper and Matthews are providing the engineering know-how to accurately compare yields harvested by spindle picker and stripper, and station economist Lafferty is translating the differences into the very important effects on the producer's income. The general interest in their results is so considerable that the findings are being demanded as soon as available. I have these copies of Arkansas Farm Research to illustrate this point.

Associated Arkansas station research on cotton production deals with the quality and value of lint from seed cotton stored in bulk lots. Storing seed cotton before ginning may be a practical means of alleviating crowded conditions at gin yards during the peak of the harvesting season. Cost is an important consideration to a farmer or ginner who is deciding whether to store or not to store seed cotton. Longer periods of storage of harvested cotton without quality deterioration may be a means of reducing ginning costs, or of preventing an increase. Seed cotton containing 14 percent moisture has been stored up to 94 days without heating, and the price and spinning performance of lint were not affected. On other lots, standard quality measurements indicated that heating resulted in either an improvement or no change in fiber length, fiber strength, yarn appearance, nep count, and picker and card waste. The neighboring States of Missouri and Louisiana are closely concerned with these efforts and their scientists are contributing basic data to the Arkansas studies as well.

TOBACCO

Not all the major commodity oriented research programs use regional research programs for concentration and coordination of research effort. Tobacco, for example, is among the first five commodities in terms of cash receipts in eight States. Cash receipts from tobacco in 1962 were $1.3 billion. The State agricultural experiment stations in 14 States supported 59 projects related to tobacco in 1963 for which they expended about $949,000. There is excellent cooperation in tobacco research between these States and USDA agencies. Research on tobacco, especially research to eliminate ingredients in cigarette smoke which may be detrimental to human health will be initiated or accelerated, in cooperation with medical schools or other health-related research agencies when appropriate.

OTHER COMMODITIES

While the commodities listed on the five maps account for about 90 percent of cash receipts, there are a host of others which are important in one or more States. These include turkeys, peanuts, oats, and a host of fruits, vegetables, nut, and seed crops. Missing, too, is pasture and range covering 850 million acres of land. Its yield in feed is about equivalent to our corn crop. It abounds in problems needing research-problems which, when and if solved would help beef, dairy, and sheep producers lower their cost of production. These problems include more effective use of available water, establishment and maintenance of superior forage species, weed and brush control, breeding of more palatable, long season grasses, and the eternal problem of managing both range and range livestock.

30-087-64—pt. 2- -19

NATURAL AND HUMAN RESOURCES

Nor is all research in the State agricultural experiment stations commodity oriented. Resources used in agriculture, alternate uses for such resources, and subsistence of rural families are other very important areas.

The natural resources used in agriculture, land, water, and air, weather and climate are basic to its continuing productivity. Land in farms amounts to about 60 percent of the land surface of the coterminous States. Agriculture is a principal beneficial user of water. Irrigation farming accounts for about 90 percent of the water that is consumptively used.

Because agriculture has improved its efficiency through the application of technology developed through research, we have land and water enough for farming, for living space and recreation, too. Research needs in these areas are great in comparison to needs and expected benefits.

Map 6 shows the value of farmlands and buildings in each of the four experiment station regions, the acreage in farms and the 1963 expenditures for research related to soil, water, and air resources in the State agricultural experiment stations. At current prices, farmland and buildings are worth about $143 billion. The State agricultural experiment stations have about $14.6 million for research to maintain and enhance their productive capacity. This is about 0.01 percent of current worth. Many increasingly urgent, important problems remain to be undertaken.

Stations in the Northeast region are devoting relatively more attention to resource research in proportion to acreage and land value than are stations in the other three regions. This is probably due to public interest in resource development in this area reflecting population density.

Effective regional resource research is conducted under regional projects listed in all four regions. There are 5 regional projects in the North-Central, 3 in the Northeast, 4 in the South, and 10 in the West. ARS participates in these projects as well as the agricultural experiment stations in the respective regions.

Alternative uses of land and farming adjustments are foremost among our concerns, and the stations concentrated their scientific resources through the cooperative regional research mechanism during 1963 on these problems. Over two-thirds of the stations participated in a series of regional projects designed to determine alternative opportunities and adjustment possibilities for the various land-use areas of the Nation. Southern and north-central regional station scientists joined with USDA researchers to develop procedures and program optimum farm organizations. Farm plans were modeled for representative resource situations. incorporating acreage allotment restrictions, in a number of subregions. Such plans are being widely used in resident teaching and extension programs, by vocational agricultural teachers, credit agencies, and others concerned with farm planning, adjustment potentials, and rural area develop ment. Studies now in progress will disclose minimum resources required to attain specified income levels in the various land-use areas of the South and Central States.

Twelve western stations have made considerable progress collecting basic data on farm enterprises, classification of farms, and determination of adjustment possibilities. Aggregation totals have been obtained for the majority of the wheat farms in the region for a selected group of wheat programs. Associated projects sponsored and directed by the Economic Research Service of USDA are an integral part of the regional study. Association with workers in other regions is also taking place. The members of the wheat adjustment States have frequently met with workers in the Great Plains States. Representatives of the cotton States in the West have met with research workers from the southern regional project to coordinate procedures.

Another major area which doesn't show up in cash receipts is the farm dwelling and the farm products which are consumed at home. These have an aggregate value of more than $3 billion annually. Research directly related to living on the farm includes research in human nutrition, clothing, and housing. The results of such research are equally applicable to nonfarm rural people, who outnumber the farm people, and much of it to all people who eat food, wear clothes, and live in houses. Map 7 shows the value of home consumption and the gross rental value of farm dwellings and the 1960 farm and rural nonfarm population for each region. Also shown are the 1963 expenditures for research in foods and nutrition, clothing and textiles and housing and the problems of living and making a living on the farm.