At a House Agriculture Committee hearing before the Congressional recess, Rep. Eric Sorensen (D-IL) asked the witness panel about how to approach technological innovations and communications at a time when people are doubting scientific institutions.
00:00I'm staying with that Illinois theme. Recognize Mr. Sorenson for five minutes.
00:05Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and to our ranking member. Agriculture in America today is being stressed from all different directions.
00:13New invasive pests are spreading from pen to pen and field to field.
00:18New weather patterns are developing, causing more frequent deray shows, flash flooding,
00:23and as of today, the University of Nebraska reports nearly half of our country is experiencing drought conditions.
00:30Point being, we need smarter, safer solutions.
00:35Illinois farmers, as the Congresswoman had mentioned, were some of the best in the world
00:39when it comes to increasing production and being resilient in the face of adversity.
00:45Our job's on this committee to make sure that operations can be passed on to the next generation.
00:52We must give our farmers the tools that they need to succeed.
00:56I believe innovation is how we make the biggest move forward.
01:02We can use biologicals to lower inputs needed to deter pests, and microbes can help us grow crops.
01:09In my district, the beacon of innovation is the Department of Agriculture's National Center for Agriculture Utilization Research.
01:17But those of us in the heart of Illinois, we know it as the Peoria Ag Lab.
01:22Famous for discovering the method to mass-produce penicillin, the Ag Lab continues to be at the forefront in developing value-added agricultural products
01:34and has been for nearly 80 years.
01:38A key area of the lab's work focuses on enhancing crop resilience.
01:42Scientists there have developed a natural pest control from a by-product of mustard seed
01:48and also found a red cedar plant compounds that help predatory ladybird beetles.
01:54Innovation allows us to control crop pests naturally, and there's even more research that goes way above my head.
02:03From precision agriculture to increasing soil quality, providing resilience, the problem here is this.
02:10The path from laboratory to farm field, it remains too long and too uncertain.
02:19And it's not just creating innovation.
02:21It's scaling up.
02:22It's meeting standards.
02:23It's earning producer trust, and it's building supply chains.
02:27That requires investment, and it requires bipartisan agreement that we still want to make sure that farmers have access to the tools that they succeed.
02:38Mr. Cameron, I will begin with you.
02:40I've heard stories where something so simple as failing to specify how to properly apply biologicals to crops actually lowered the effectiveness.
02:51Ultimately, it wasted the farmer's time and money.
02:53In your testimony, you made a couple of suggestions, such as creating incentives and providing technical guidance.
03:00Could you elaborate on this, and are there specific products that you've seen adopted that farmers were initially wary of,
03:08but then they came around to it, and how do we help identify new uses for biologicals?
03:15I understand that biologicals are new for many growers.
03:19Their margins, as you know, are thin.
03:20They're reluctant to take the chance on a new product, especially when we talk about biologicals that may require special application, special handling,
03:31maybe a combination of several biologicals to make the products function synergistically to be effective.
03:38We know that there's actually not many people out there that really have the knowledge for that, the training,
03:46to be able to articulate that to the growers at the level that they'll want to try and understand.
03:54We've been working with trying new products on our farm.
03:58We're constantly doing our own trials.
04:00It's trial and error, right?
04:00Yeah, we sometimes think we're a test or research station, but we know that if we don't do it, we're going to be left behind.
04:11Thank you for that.
04:12Yeah.
04:12I appreciate that.
04:13I want to get to Mr. Weatherby.
04:15You know, as a scientist myself, I'm always concerned with the increasing anti-science rhetoric around the country,
04:20and it gets politicized, and it's terrible, honestly.
04:23You know, we've seen it in campaigns around GMOs and corn syrup, and now consumers are becoming skittish when they hear gene editing.
04:31I've got 30 seconds left.
04:33How can companies like Agregene and the government more effectively communicate the safety of new technologies?
04:40Well, part of it, I think, is financing the science and being supportive of the science,
04:44particularly if it's the U.S. science, right?
04:46And it's in our nation's interest.
04:48So part of it is going back to more of a fact-based approach of, you know, this is the facts.
04:54We've tested.
04:55We've put it out in our main-grant universities.
04:57We've had some of our best scientists test this, and here's the proven facts about this, not the hearsay.
05:02And I think it's important to get back to the facts and to then make sure that that's being represented to the growers
05:08that then get the opportunity to try some of these tools.
05:11As I said, some of them will work, some won't, but part of it is trying to find that out
05:15and doing that early through trusted people like what we have in terms of our scientists
05:20and folks at land-grant universities is very important.
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