With the debt ceiling hurly burly behind it, Congress must now turn to more prosaic pursuits, including crafting the 2023 Farm Bill, due in September. Enacted every five years since 1933, this legislation shapes agricultural economics in ways large and small.

Under the last Farm Bill, adopted at the end of 2018, total federal funding on agriculture for the years 2019-2023 is projected to be $428 billion. It would be an epic mistake for Congress to simply roll the priorities embodied in that law forward given what we have experienced since 2018: the Covid pandemic, the Ukraine war, chillier relations with China (which imported $36 billion of American ag products last year, a >3x increase over the 2019 level), increasingly severe weather events, unintended invasive insect introductions (e.g., Spotted Lanternfly), and mounting pressures on Western states’ scarce water resources.

The political bargain reflected in Farm Bills of the last 50 years has been federal funding of colossal growth in agricultural output, especially corn and soybeans, at the expense of family farms, and soil and water quality. Political support from farm-state Congressmen has been directed by major agribusinesses, including Monsanto, Cargill, ADM, John Deere and Pioneer (a seed company). Non-farm-state Congressmen have backed successive farm bills because 70% of the funds go to SNAP, formerly food stamps, for low-income Americans.

States have used federal funding to advance their own interests. For example, California in the 1990s and 2000s funded creation of super-sized corporate dairy farms/factories. California wagered it could do in dairy what it did in wine—take over the #1 position at the expense of farmers in New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The strategy worked. Today, California is funding innovations designed to reduce methane emissions from dairy and beef herds, believing that will win favor with consumers who shop with one eye on environmental stewardship.

Why should we care how the 2023 Farm Bill divides the fiscal pie or how our states use their shares? Because the Green Revolution of the late 20th Century—dramatically higher yields due to heavy use of chemical fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides—has run its course. Needed now are new technologies that preserve and protect natural resources essential for agriculture. Robotics, energy conservation and land conservation all deserve greater support in the 2023 Farm Bill. Conservation measures in prior bills have always been oversubscribed by farmers who desire to participate. Robotics offer the prospect of improved yields using constant levels of natural resources. Given our region’s prominence in robotics, we are in an ideal position to lead this effort.

Exhibit A is Bloomfield Robotics, a company born of research at Carnegie Mellon University. The company’s website says its computer vision technology when fitted to farm tractors “combines plant-level imaging and deep learning to assess the health and performance of every plant, at any scale continuously, with extreme precision and accuracy.” Japanese farm implement company Kobota is among the investors in Bloomfield’s latest funding round.

Exhibit B is Fifth Season, another CMU-generated venture. Fifth Season failed financially, as did two much larger vertical farming businesses, Kalera in Florida in April and AeroFarms in Virginia and North Carolina on June 8. Vertical farming is promising technology to be sure. Its Achilles Heel is the cost of production exceeds the cost of field-grown crops given current levels of federal support of that form of agriculture. In Canada, 15,000 acres are devoted to greenhouse production of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers. The Netherlands is the world leader in controlled environment agriculture.[1]

Indoor agriculture using robotics also has the potential to eradicate agricultural child labor. Big agricultural interests have long protected the exemption of children as young as 12 years old from the minimum wage requirement of the Fair Labor Standards Act. As a result, children working in the fields on farms where their parents are also employed are paid as little as $2.00 to $3.00 an hour.[2]

Exhibit C is Fruit Scout, a Yakima, Washington-based company that uses computer vision to automate projection of fruit yields for Northwest U.S. fruit growers. The company’s website claims, “FruitScout uses AI and computer vision to analyze photos you take of buds, blossoms, fruitlets, and fruits. Counts and sizes are calculated automatically, making sure you always know where your crop stands, from bud to bin.”

All three ventures are solutions that help agriculture stand against the natural consequences of severe weather and increased pest pressure. The problem they share is they need more money to scale their businesses than private equity sources are willing to provide. Meanwhile, federal funding is committed to preserving the status quo.

Noting the 2018 Farm Bill’s allocation of just $694 million to research and development (0.16% of the legislation’s total funds), FarmAid.org offered this commentary: “Funding for public agriculture research in the U.S. has declined significantly in recent decades. Meanwhile countries like Brazil and China have increased investment in public research by as much as five times. While policymakers tend to agree that policy is crucial, when it comes to committing money to it, their enthusiasm wanes. For instance, the 2018 Farm Bill created the Agriculture Advanced Research and Development Authority (AGARDA) as a pilot program, modeled after the high-tech military research agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Congress authorized using as much as $50 million a year on AGARDA, but the project just received its first $1 million in 2022.”[3]

DARPA is the foundation for much of the success of CMU, its peer academic institutions and the companies they have spawned. Addressing challenges American agriculture faces via AGARDA requires a DARPA-like sense of urgency and financial commitment from Congress. State departments of agriculture and economic development similarly need to up their game.

We can achieve a future that serves the world’s food needs with greater efficiency and better stewardship of precious resources. Needed though is a sense of purpose and urgency, not just a rerun of the last fifty years’ spending on programs whose time has passed.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/netherlands-agriculture-technology/

[2] http://www.ncfh.org/child-labor-fact-sheet.html.

[3] https://www.farmaid.org/issues/farm-policy/farm-bill-101/