The Feed the Future Initiative helped connect agricultural research at 17 labs — based at land grant universities throughout the U.S. — with foreign partners in an Obama-era effort to address global hunger.
Now only one of the innovation labs is receiving federal funding.
The Trump administration paused funding to the U.S. Agency for International Development in January, followed by a near-complete dismantling of the agency this spring, including the Feed the Future program.
That left the program’s agricultural researchers to depend on funding from their own universities or private donations, while some hope that Congressional members will step in.
WORK AT THE University of Illinois’ Soybean Innovation Lab has resumed, although on a reduced scale.
Lab director Peter Goldsmith said that’s thanks to a $1 million anonymous private donation.
“They reached out back at the end of February, and they liked our story,” said Goldsmith. “They liked what we were proposing to do and they put things in position.”
Goldsmith spoke with several media outlets when the funding was paused last winter. The lab had been federally funded through 2027 as part of the Feed the Future program.
Now, instead of government-funded projects in several countries, the donation will pay for a year’s work on adapting soybean farming and processing techniques to the hot, low-elevation environment in the east African nation of Malawi.
Goldsmith said the project is a good choice considering their reduced funding.
“So all the various features are in miniature, and that was intentional,” said Goldsmith. “We thought that would be helpful to maximize the potential that we would be able to find additional funding in the future.”
The donation allowed the lab to hire back about eight of its approximately 30 employees. Goldsmith said he is now focused on finding more funding to keep the Soybean Innovation Lab going in future years.
“I don’t think federal funding will be forthcoming,” he said. “And the Soybean Innovation Lab needs to find — as well as the other labs — we need to focus on finding other sources of research dollars.”
AT MICHIGAN State University, the Innovation Lab for Food Security Policy Research, Capacity and Influence focused on enhancing local policy research organizations’ ability to conduct high-quality research and better influence policy.
“We continue to do some of that work, just none of it now is with USAID funding, and therefore it’s at a substantially reduced scale,” said lab director David Tschirley.
Tschirley, who also served as chair of the Council of the Innovation Labs, said he suspects that’s true at many of the universities that housed Feed the Future labs.
