Cows, politics and the budget
From the lede of a story in Tuesday's paper:
REIDSVILLE - The doe-eyed black Angus cattle lounging under a stand of trees at a farm called the Upper Piedmont Research Station hardly look like the center of a political tug-of-war in Raleigh.The stations, 18 farms across the state, focus on issues such as growing drought-resistant corn and how best to fatten up heifers like those who sought shade here on Monday.
But a proposal by state senators to transfer management of the 18 research stations from the Department of Agriculture to N.C. State has sparked an argument involving land conservation, government efficiency and the state’s $20 billion budget.
Click here for the full story.
(Here's a shot of the afore mentioned cows by staff photog Nelson Kepley. Click to enlarge.)
As has been noted elsewhere (Asheville Citizen Times / Exile on Jones Street / The AP), the fate of the state's Agricultural Research Stations is at the center of political tussle in Raleigh.
The stations are essentially designed to take ideas developed in the lab and test them out in a farm environment. Right now, they are run by the Department of Agriculture, but a Senate budget proposal would shift them to the control of N.C. State.
As you might imagine, this has lead to some friction between the Ag Department at the university. And it has gotten caught up in state budget negotiations (you remember the state budget, which was due on July 1 but is still a work in progress). The Senate has proposed the switch as part of the budget, the House is pushing back against the idea.
Some linkage:
- Info on the stations from the Ag Department, including where they are in your neck of the woods and what they're studying. I visted the Upper Piedmont station Monday.
- This is a memo from Senate President Pro Tempore's Marc Basnight's staff giving the rationale for the change.
- This is a letter Ag Commissioner Steve Troxler sent to others in the farm community last month outlining why he opposed the move.
- This is a letter Troxler sent to legislators on Monday.
What's really going on here? Basically, various interests are running up against one another. None of them are acting completely irrationally, but when they marinate in a political stew they can get nasty. The scorecard so far:
- The Senate: Remember, the Senate budget proposal spent $300 million less that the House version in an effort to end two "temporary" taxes (the upper quarter percent of the sales and income taxes). To do that, they had (and have) a strong incentive to trim where they can, and as the above memo shows, they think they can get $2 million out of the transfer.
It's also worth pointing out that the Senate has long had a (deserved) reputation for responding to the requests and interests of the UNC system. Suffice it to say, they don't share the same type of relationship with the Department of Agriculture.
- The House: Budget writers over there seem to want to have a little more say in how the transfer goes down. Specifically, I think, they want to know how any of the land associated with the research farms will be divested.
Since Troxler has been in office, he says that Democrats and Republicans alike have been far more receptive to his department's agenda than the Senate.
- N.C. State, Steve Leath: I spoke with him for a while Monday morning. His pitch is that putting the farms under the university system only makes sense. He said that researchers would never work in labs that they don't control, yet they're force to cede control of projects to the Agriculture Department for crop research.
Basically, he's interested in having the farms do cutting-edge research and he thinks the relationship with the Ag Department gets in the way of that.
(I'll get to the selling of land thing in a second.)
By the way, a recent Dome item noted that Leath had just been promoted to "vice president for research of the 16-campus University of North Carolina system."
- The Department of Agriculture, Steve Troxler: Troxler makes a few arguments. The first is, don't mess what's worked for 70 years. (He says Leath doesn't know what he's talking about when he says research has been slowed down.) Secondly, he says the department provides an important counterweight to the university's research goals. Yes, cutting edge research is important, but Troxler says it has to be done in a way that translates into the farm work being done on family farms across the state.
Lastly, Troxler said that it makes no sense to line up prime farmland for development, especially when the state is looking for ways to buy up open space.
On that last point, Leath acknowledges that the university would likely divest itself of some of the land, using the profits to add to or build up other farms in the system. The university already owns some farms not in the research station fold, and you can well imagine some of those assets being shuffled about.
But, Leath says, nothing would happen without consulting the legislature, NCA&T and others.
Still, for a lot of folks, this potential sale of research station property may be where they begin to take a big interest in this story.