Agricultural Innovators: The Science Feeding Americans
America's world-class food system benefits handsomely from the lab, where basic research helps enhance what we grow, raise, and eat. Innovations in U.S. agriculture are driven by federally funded science at colleges and universities across the nation.
Agricultural research improves animal health, disease prevention, crop resilience, food safety, resilient farming, and more. At The Science of Agriculture, The Science Coalition (TSC) gathered policymakers, academic researchers, and industry leaders to recognize the transformational outcomes and returns on investment that result from robust and sustained federal investments in basic scientific research.
This month’s Research Innovators edition profiles seven TSC member institution researchers who participated in The Science of Agriculture and highlights their work to advance the nation’s agricultural innovation.
Pennsylvania State University
Researchers:
Jeffrey Hyde, Ph.D. — Associate Dean and Director of Penn State Extension
John Boney, Ph.D. — Vernon E. Norris Faculty Fellow of Poultry Nutrition, Associate Professor of Poultry Science
Dr. Jeffrey Hyde is a Professor of Agricultural Economics and the Director of Penn State Extension, where he leads a statewide network of more than 200 educators across all 67 Pennsylvania counties. His work helps ensure that university research reaches the farmers, businesses, and communities that need it most. His team recently unveiled Tilva, a free AI assistant that gives farmers and agricultural professionals around-the-clock access to research-based guidance drawn from decades of Penn State Extension expertise. A producer can upload a photo of a diseased crop or type a complex farming question in plain language into the Tilva assistant and receive accurate, Pennsylvania-specific answers in seconds. Federal investments from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) supported the underlying research and the network of expert educators who make Tilva reliable.
Dr. John Boney serves as the Vernon E. Norris Faculty Fellow of Poultry Nutrition and an Associate Professor of Poultry Science at Penn State, where he studies how to feed poultry more efficiently and how to protect poultry when disease strikes. Amid a recent highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak, Dr. Boney worked directly with the poultry industry and government agencies to write and review biosecurity plans and deliver science-based education to help producers mitigate virus introduction. His research tackles a core challenge in modern poultry production: Understanding how feed and nutrients move through turkey and broiler systems so producers can enhance feeding efficiency and improve animal health and welfare. Supported by federal grant funding, Dr. Boney's research into novel feed ingredients, including insect-based meals, aims to develop alternative protein sources that reduce the land and resource demands.
The Ohio State University
Researcher:
Alex Lindsey, Ph.D. — Professor of Horticulture and Crop Science
Dr. Alex Lindsey is a Professor of Horticulture and Crop Science at The Ohio State University and a researcher with the Center for Soybean Research. His research helps growers better prepare for and respond to challenging conditions by exploring how crops, particularly soybeans and corn, interact with environmental and weather-related stresses. Dr. Lindsey’s findings have yielded recommendations on planting depth and timing to help maximize harvests across Ohio and beyond.
Supported in part by federal funding through NIFA, including the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative and Strengthening Agricultural Systems programs, Dr. Lindsey’s lab addresses immediate, grower-centered questions and the underlying biological processes that drive crop performance. The work reflects a deep commitment to research, education, and training — ensuring that federal investments translate into real-world benefits for students, agricultural professionals, and the communities they serve.
University of California, Riverside
Researchers:
Danelle Seymour, Ph.D.— Assistant Professor of Genetics
Sean Cutler, Ph.D. — Distinguished Professor of Plant Cell Biology
Dr. Danelle Seymour leads the Seymour Lab in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at UC Riverside, where her team uses modern genetic and statistical genomic tools to develop superior citrus varieties for California growers. Her most urgent focus is huanglongbing (HLB), a disease that threatens the U.S. citrus industry. Dr. Seymour leads a $6.8 million federally funded project to breed HLB-tolerant rootstocks that could give growers a durable path to protecting their orchards.
Dr. Sean Cutler is a Distinguished Professor of Plant Cell Biology at UC Riverside, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. With federal support, his lab solved a decades-old puzzle in plant biology: how plants detect drought and switch on their own defenses. That discovery enabled his team to build synthetic chemicals that trigger drought protection in crops and engineer plants whose traits can be turned on with a simple spray. In a state where water scarcity defines the limits of agricultural production, Dr. Cutler's research connects fundamental plant biology to the food security challenges California and the nation face today.
University of Pennsylvania
Researcher:
Thomas D. Parsons, VMD, Ph.D., — Professor of Swine Production Medicine
Dr. Thomas D. Parsons, the Marie A. Moore Professor of Animal Welfare and Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine, has spent decades reimagining what humane animal agriculture can look like. As director of both Penn Vet's Swine Teaching and Research Center and their Center for Stewardship Agriculture and Food Security, his work sits at the intersection of veterinary science, neuroscience, and animal behavior — asking not just how production systems function, but how the animals living within them actually experience them. Rather than assuming what conditions are best for animals, Dr. Parsons and his team have developed methodologies that let the animals themselves provide answers, revealing something even more nuanced: Individual animals might have different welfare needs.
To keep pace with the scale of that data, his lab is now integrating computer vision and AI tools to accelerate the analysis of behavioral experiments that were once painstakingly coded frame by frame. That work is made possible primarily by federal investments, with important aspects of his work funded exclusively by the USDA, so for Dr. Parsons, the stakes extend well beyond any single experiment. Animal welfare research occupies a precarious position in the federal funding landscape, and the continuity of this work — the kind that puts American agriculture roughly a decade ahead of its next major challenges — depends on the kind of predictable, long-term investment that only the federal government can provide.
Washington State University
Researcher:
Jon Oatley, Ph.D., Regents Professor in the School of Molecular Biosciences, Associate Dean for Research for the College of Veterinary Medicine
Dr. Jon Oatley is the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Veterinary Medicine and a Regents Professor in the School of Molecular Biosciences at Washington State University. He leads the Resilient Livestock Initiative, which applies cutting-edge biotechnology, including CRISPR gene editing and AI, to engineer traits in food animals that address the most pressing threats facing producers today. He works with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to improve reproductive capacity and animal welfare, developing livestock that are healthier, happier, and thriftier, and was one of four US researchers chosen to author a Congressionally-mandated report on the future of genetic modification research and law. Support from agencies like NIH and USDA allows Dr. Oatley's team to pursue high-reward, moonshot projects that would otherwise be out of reach.
The Science Behind America's Food Supply
Sustained federal funding for fundamental research at U.S. colleges and universities strengthens U.S. agricultural production, keeps the nation competitive, and helps farmers and producers navigate the most complex and pressing food challenges we face.