Tagged: agriculture research

Over the next four weeks, Business Beat will be airing the remaining pieces of the Harvest Public Media series called America’s Big Beef: An Industry In Transition.

To kick off the series, we have to go back 150 years when Abraham Lincoln established the land-grant colleges where research could be done to help the common man. But Peggy Lowe of Harvest Public Media reports that today public colleges in the top five beef-producing states are now often working for big business.

This is the latest installment of Harvest Public Media’s Field Notes, in which reporters talk to newsmakers and experts about important issues related to food production.

A war over words is part of a bigger struggle between agriculture interests and their critics. Plus, a national report looks at agriculture research grants from private corporations to land grant Universities, including MU.

A report in April from the Washington based environmental group Food and Water Watch researched the relationship between public universities and the corporations that give the schools agriculture research grants. The study found that corporate money was accounting for a large part of funding to agriculture schools all around the country, including the University of Missouri.