Comparisons with the US Land Grant System
Within the United States, the Land Grant University System is the centrepiece of the agricultural science establishment. This very successful system is based on the coordination of research scientists, extension personnel, and universities in centres of excellence (the State universities) (Just and Rausser, 1993). This integrated system was considered in New Zealand in 1925, but was turned down, mainly due to departmental/ university rivalries (Nightingdale 1992), and the commitment to public provision.
In the US, a decreasing share of public funds for research is going into agriculture, though this has been more than offset by private funding. A result of this has been private companies "leveraging" off public funds — scientists’ time has tended to concentrate more on specific private needs, despite public funds supporting some of that time, and some general overhead costs. This has tended to crowd out public good research, such as social science and safety and environmental research. In New Zealand, the response from the private sector has been slower, and public money still funds the majority of social science and environmental research (MoRST 1996).
The research focus of the land grant universities has broadened considerably to include agribusiness, consumers, and environmental groups as well as producers. Many of the newer research tools developed by the universities had little synergy with existing extension efforts, which concentrate on the farm sector, and often were of no direct use to farmers. This has resulted in an ongoing decline of the land grant model of integrated teaching-research-extension (Just and Rausser, 1993). Most of the benefit of publicly funded research was being captured by a minority of private farmers (the larger farms). In New Zealand, this decline in the research-extension nexus has been achieved by administrative fiat: state-funded extension has largely ceased to exist and production research scaled down. The concentration of benefits from agricultural research is not so evident in New Zealand possibly due to the dominance of livestock farming compared to crop farming in the US.
Contact for Enquiries
Rural Affairs Coordinator
Sector Performance Policy
MAF Policy
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
PO Box 2526
Wellington
NEW ZEALAND
Phone: +64 4 894 0675
Fax: +64 4 4 894 0745
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