By Karl Plume and P.J. Huffstutter
DAVIS, California (Reuters) – From its earliest days in 1906, when the University of California secured a small stretch of fertile soil in the state’s Central Valley, a quiet promise took root – that this place, originally called University Farm, would someday grow mighty.
For decades, UC Davis stood tall among the world’s giants in agricultural research.
All that changed in a few short days amid a sweeping overhaul of the federal government as the Trump administration froze funds, closed down labs and shut out scientists’ ability to secure grants for future research.
Poultry genetics research was shut down, fruit and vegetable test plots went unwatered, and work to help small farms insure against crop loss was handed off to partners overseas as federal support, by far the largest pool of funding, evaporated.
Collectively, millions of dollars in funds from the shuttered United States Agency for International Development disappeared and U.S. Department of Agriculture and other federally backed grants were frozen, while broad new administration rules regarding diversity crippled crucial science on food security and climate resilience at one of the nation’s top agriculture schools.
The moves at UC Davis and other land-grant universities have halted farm-related research projects midstream, according to interviews with more than a dozen agricultural researchers, professors and economists.
“U.S. universities, they’re really a model for the world,” UC Davis economist Michael Carter told Reuters. “What’s at risk of being lost is stuff that can make a difference in the lives of lots and lots of people.”
Future food and farm research is also in jeopardy with new federal grants tied up in lawsuits winding through the courts.
And Davis risks having to turn away graduate students this fall: There simply may not be funding for jobs at the scaled-back labs.
The university has not rescinded admission offers to students who submitted a statement of intent to enroll, UC President Michael Drake told Reuters. But some graduate programs have moved students who have not accepted their offers to waitlists due to the funding uncertainty, he said.
Federal grant awards and proposals to Davis totaled about $2.75 billion in fiscal 2024, eclipsing $1.83 billion in funding from state grants, private and non-profit contributions, according to UC data. The university said it did not have an estimate for the recent cuts because Trump’s executive orders are still being litigated.
The White House said in a statement to Reuters that Trump’s actions would allow for “more critical research, not less, while cutting bureaucracy, bloat, and programs that do not align with the America First agenda,” but did not elaborate further.
The State Department, in a statement to Reuters, said its actions were aimed at aligning its programs with the administration’s foreign policy priorities and ensuring tax dollars are spent in the national interest.
The USDA did not respond to a request for comment.
Money remains frozen while the Trump administration considers appeals of court orders blocking its freeze on $3 trillion in federal grants, loans and other financial aid.
The aftermath has left everyone here shaken.
PANIC ATTACKS
On a recent morning, researcher Tara Chiu awoke at 3 a.m., as she has every day since a USAID notice arrived, terminating her work helping poor farmers manage market and climate risks. The emailed notice from USAID Agreement Officer Olivia Ricks, reviewed by Reuters, said the work was “not aligned with agency priorities” and “not in the national interest.”
“I’ve had a panic attack every night,” Chiu said. “I feel like my entire torso is being crushed.”
She and her boss Carter, the economist, relied on USAID funding for research that helps small-scale farmers escape poverty traps.
Their appeals to the State Department to remain open went unanswered. The lab’s $4.3 million in USAID funding remaining from a nearly $22.6 million, multi-year grant is unlikely to be restored, Carter and Chiu said.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.
Across the Davis campus, Erin McGuire’s USAID-funded horticulture lab, will also shut down at the end of April. The lab is renowned for tackling some of the world’s most pressing questions, including how to feed a growing global population while climate change threatens farmers’ ability to grow food.
As the deadline nears, McGuire is scrambling to hand off management of fruit and vegetable test plots overseas to research partners there while also tackling a mound of paperwork required to close out any research project, a process that would typically take up to six months.
McGuire’s work cultivated drought-resistant tomatoes and ways to kill produce-eating pests and control toxic fungi. It helped the United States remain a leader in agricultural technology even as rivals like China and Brazil ramped up public investment in their own research.
Two time zones to the east, University of Illinois researcher Peter Goldsmith laid off 30 staff and will shutter his Soybean Innovation Lab this month.
His research into soybean cultivation in hotter, drier climates was aimed at making soybeans the industry standard for vegetable oil worldwide, opening up future markets for U.S. producers in the coming decades.
The three labs were among 17 lead labs and dozens of collaborating labs at universities across the country within the USAID-funded Feed the Future Innovation Labs program created in 2012.
FOLLOWING THE MONEY
The U.S. government’s funding of agriculture research was slumping even before the Trump cuts, falling by about a third over the past two decades, according to USDA data.
According to the agency’s Economic Research Service (ERS), funding levels for public agriculture research and development were around $5 billion annually in 2020 – or about the same level as in 1970, when adjusted for inflation. How much private investment offset this drop is not known, ERS said.
Meanwhile, top farm goods importer China and major exporter Brazil have poured money into such research, with China becoming the largest funder of agricultural R&D in the world, ERS said.
If U.S. government funding of public R&D continues its decline, U.S. farmers would see lower crop yields as climate pressures intensify by midcentury, Cornell University and University of Maryland economists and an agricultural ecologist at Stanford University wrote in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal paper published in March.
If farm productivity drops, the likelihood of government aid bailouts increases, the researchers said.
During the first Trump administration, farmers received about $217 billion in crop support, disaster and other aid programs, including some related to COVID and his trade war with China – more than in any four-year period since 1933 when adjusted for inflation, according to a Reuters examination of USDA data.
Now, the Trump administration is deciding whether to bail out farmers damaged by the current tariff backlash – even as research programs that benefit them are shuttering.
Kevin Bellido, manager at the UC Davis avian research and teaching facility, was already concerned that bird flu that has decimated poultry flocks across California would find its way into his research barns.
Now, he worries that suspensions of federal grants would deprive the 18-acre research facility of projects like one aimed at identifying birds that are genetically more resilient against Newcastle disease, which spreads similarly to avian flu and is equally deadly.
“If we get our funding cut, we basically wouldn’t have anything to teach students,” he said over deafening rooster crows from a nearby barn housing a half dozen breeds, including the heat-tolerant and more disease-resilient Egyptian Fayoumi.
The funding uncertainty is beginning to ripple across the Davis campus in other ways.
Allen Van Deynze, director of the seed biotechnology center, relies on federal and private grants to fund his work to develop more disease-resistant spinach and easier-to-harvest peppers. His federal grants were spared in the wave of cuts, but that funding only runs through June.
Van Deynze said he is unable to apply for new federal grants because the government’s online grant request platform has been frozen.
“Nobody’s taking students this fall,” he said, “because nobody knows if they’ll have money.”
(Reporting by Karl Plume in Davis, California, and P.J. Huffstutter in Chicago. Editing by Emily Schmall and Suzanne Goldenberg)
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