Sources

United States public agricultural research and development peaked at $7.64 billion in 2002 and had fallen to $5.16 billion by 2019, about a third lower in real terms.

Figures in constant 2019 dollars, covering USDA laboratories, land grant universities and cooperating institutions. Public R&D investment is the primary driver of long term agricultural productivity growth.

The annual series behind that decline runs from $5.47 billion in 1970 to a peak of $8.11 billion in 2002 and $5.75 billion in 2021, in constant 2022 dollars.

Public agricultural and food research and development expenditures, covering USDA intramural agencies and State universities and cooperating institutions, deflated by the research and development price index. The chart on the manifesto page plots this series.

China overtook the United States as the largest public funder of agricultural research in 2011 and by 2015 was spending roughly twice as much.

China was spending more than $10 billion a year on agricultural research and development by 2015, close to five times its own spending in 2000.

Public agricultural research has returned about $20 to the United States economy for every $1 spent since 1900.

More than four out of five estimated rates of return fall between 20 and 60 percent, with a median estimate of 45 percent. Benefits reach the farm sector, the food industry and consumers.

The United States ran an agricultural trade surplus for nearly sixty years until 2019. It now runs a deficit, which reached a record $43.7 billion in fiscal 2025.

USDA forecasts the deficit narrowing to $29.0 billion in fiscal 2026. That improvement comes from imports contracting by more than $16 billion rather than from export growth, and exports remain below their fiscal 2024 level.

The average age of a United States farm producer is 58.1 years, and has risen in every census since 2002.

There are four times as many producers aged 65 and over as there are under 35. Producers younger than 45 represented 22 percent of the total in 2022, up from 20 percent in 2017.

The Department of Labor certified approximately 363,000 H-2A seasonal farm worker positions in fiscal year 2024.

Foreign born workers represent roughly two thirds of the hired farm labor force, with undocumented workers accounting for around 40 percent of hired crop laborers.

United States agricultural total factor productivity growth fell from 2.09 percent a year in the 1980s to 0.28 percent between 2014 and 2023, a historical minimum.

On the harmonised international basis used for country comparison, United States growth averaged about negative 0.05 percent over the past decade while China averaged 1.9 percent, backed by roughly twice the research funding. Global productivity growth averaged 0.76 percent against a target near 2 percent.

The largest effects of public agricultural research on productivity appear up to thirty years after the money is spent.

United States public research funding growth began to slow in the early 1980s and plateaued around 2000, so the productivity slowdown of the 2010s reflects diminishing returns on a knowledge stock built decades earlier rather than any failure of current science.

United States agricultural productivity grew fastest during the 1980s farm crisis, when capital was least available.

Real interest rates near 16 percent contracted input use and forced operators to work existing technology harder. The credit driven 1970s and the low interest 2010s both encouraged input intensification and slowed productivity growth.

Adoption of variable rate application and soil mapping remains below 25 percent of planned acreage for winter wheat, cotton, sorghum and rice.

The report describes the distance between a working innovation and on-farm practice as a valley of death, and identifies knowledge transfer, extension and adoption support as what closes it.

Agriculture is Virginia's largest private industry, with an economic impact of $82.3 billion a year and more than 381,800 jobs.

Value added impact is reported at $43.8 billion. Counted together with forestry, the combined industries produce roughly $105 billion in annual impact and more than 490,000 jobs.

Pulaski County, Virginia has an estimated population of 33,523 and a median household income of $62,028.

Population is a 2026 estimate. Median household income is the 2024 figure, up from $60,767 the prior year. Manufacturing remains the county's largest employment sector. It is cited here as one example of a rural county holding land, producers and an industrial workforce.

Pulaski County is within a day's drive of half the United States population, with access to Interstates 81 and 77.

Regional partnership figure, calculated on standard truck drive time radii. Roanoke County, an hour east on the same corridor, states two thirds on the same basis.

Virginia Tech ranked 56th among all United States institutions for total research expenditures, and 4th nationally in industrial and manufacturing engineering.

National Science Foundation Higher Education Research and Development survey, released December 2025 for activity from July 2023 through June 2024. The university also ranked 6th in natural resources and conservation, 13th in engineering and 13th in computer and information sciences, and 37th among public institutions for total research expenditures.

Virginia Tech is ranked 15th in the country for agricultural sciences.

Niche 2027 Best Colleges for Agricultural Sciences in America. A separate measure from research expenditures: on the National Science Foundation survey the university ranks 6th nationally in natural resources and conservation.

The regional additive manufacturing and advanced materials consortium won a strategy development grant in the first phase of the federal regional technology hubs program, for a strategy based in the New River Valley.

Selected from 181 applications. The work covers Floyd, Giles, Montgomery and Pulaski counties, Radford and Danville, and is led by the New River Valley Regional Commission. A strategy development grant carries planning money rather than deployment money. GO Virginia added $4.2 million to the same effort in April 2026.

RoVa Labs, a $26 million shared biotechnology incubator with 40,000 square feet of wet laboratory space, opened in Roanoke in May 2026.

Built by Carilion Clinic and the City of Roanoke with Virginia Tech and Virginia Western Community College, at 1030 South Jefferson Street. It offers private and open wet lab space, shared equipment and offices, and is expected to create 250 jobs within five years. Agriculture has no equivalent facility in the region.

The Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech Carilion holds more than 260,000 square feet of research space in Roanoke and is in the middle of a $90 million expansion.

The institute employs more than 400 faculty, staff and students across 37 faculty-led research teams. The expansion adds 139,000 square feet and is intended to double the workforce by 2027. Roanoke is about forty minutes from the New River Valley on Interstate 81.

Virginia Tech runs Kentland Farm, roughly 1,800 acres on the New River in Montgomery County, as part of a 3,200 acre college farm operation.

The farm supports research, teaching and extension programs across Virginia's major crop and livestock species, and is one of the agricultural experiment station facilities the university operates across the Commonwealth.

MOVA's panel bed filtration system completed proof of concept testing for carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and nitric oxide capture with Virginia Tech.

Testing ran through the Advanced Propulsion and Power Laboratory in the College of Engineering, with sorbent work from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The company was founded in Pulaski by Steve Critchfield, who had built and sold the telecommunications business Tele-Works Inc., and is led by chief executive John Schott. MOVA reports running research and development inside the Jefferson School building in Pulaski.

Vegg Inc. converts decommissioned public school buildings into leasable controlled environment growing space, beginning with Jefferson Elementary School, a historic 30,000 to 40,000 square foot former school in Pulaski that had been abandoned.

Federal and state historic tax credits reduce the real estate cost passed through to tenants, who lease growing space rather than build a facility. In April 2024 the site harvested its first lettuce crop, grown on carbon dioxide captured by MOVA rather than the bottled CO2 that indoor farms buy from natural gas processing. Cardinal News reported in June 2025 that Luke Allison is founder and chief development officer, Cody Journell co-founder and board president, and Toni Sperry chief science officer; an earlier company overview listed Journell as chief executive.

Pod Farms builds patented vertical hydroponic systems and was founded in 2017 by chief executive Toni Sperry.

The company's vertical channel system adapts nutrient film technique, the most widely adopted commercial hydroponic method, to a vertical arrangement. Pilot installations run at a smart agriculture site in Wilson, North Carolina and at an aquaponics facility in Warsaw, Virginia that supplies a regional food bank. Pod Farms was selected for the Regional Acceleration and Mentoring Program's spring 2025 cohort. The company reports running research and development inside the Jefferson School building in Pulaski.

A 2019 Brookings and ITIF report proposed up to $700 million a year per metropolitan area for ten years, across eight to ten places, at a total cost of roughly $100 billion.

The same report found that five metropolitan areas took more than 90 percent of innovation sector growth between 2005 and 2017, and that a third of the country's innovation jobs sit in sixteen counties. Its 35 candidate growth centers spanned 19 states.

Brookings Metro, Bass Center and ITIF, The Case for Growth Centers

The CHIPS and Science Act authorized $10 billion in August 2022 for twenty regional technology hubs.

The hubs were not required to be connected to semiconductor manufacturing. Thirty one were designated in October 2023 out of roughly 400 applications, and designation carried no money.

Through fiscal 2026 the program received a little over $800 million in appropriations against that $10 billion authorization.

The fiscal 2026 appropriation was $41 million. A further $200 million came from the proceeds of a June 2026 spectrum auction rather than from an appropriations bill.

On 20 July 2026 the Commerce Department announced its intent to invest $169 million across six of the thirty one designated hubs.

The award followed the rescission of more than $200 million in earlier awards and a rerun competition. Only two regions that won the first round won again.

The fiscal 2026 budget proposed cutting the National Institute of Food and Agriculture by about $602 million and the Agricultural Research Service by $159 million. Senate appropriators rejected both.

The Senate mark held NIFA at $1.7 billion and ARS at $1.8 billion. NIFA had stopped accepting competitive grant applications on 23 January 2025 while its programs were under review.