Promoting Agriculture

Promoting Agriculture

Promoting Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Back in the late 1800’s the Morrill Act began creating what are known as land-grant universities all across the U.S. Most of those universities are now large public colleges and include Washington State University founded in 1890. WSU has a strong background in the ag industry but due to budget cutbacks many programs may suffer. Elson Floyd is the 10th president of WSU.

FLOYD: The relative share from the four year sector has been reduced from 9% in 1991 to 3% and that translated into $980-million dollars. That’s a huge drop. At the same time we have relied disproportionately on tuition to fill the funding gap. At Washington State University and other institutions across the state we’ve seen consecutive 16% increases in tuition.

Floyd says that’s a model that’s unsustainable and he has committed the university to continuing a strong curriculum. Dan Bernardo, Dean of the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences echoes that commitment.

BERNARDO: Since the day he arrived he was talking about agriculture being his number one priority and he hasn’t wavered a bit from that. That has rung true when we’ve executed budget reductions, etc. Obviously we’ve had to take some when you lose over half of your state funding everybody’s going to be affected but he certainly has taken into account his priority and the importance of the service to this industry.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network. 

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