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Cow
College Transformed
Virginia
Tech's proposed Food, Nutrition and Health Institute could be rural Virginia's best bet for economic
revitalization.
Value-added
agriculture” sounds like one of those think-tank buzz
words with little connection to the real world. But to
see the idea in action, you need go no further than
Chase City
near the North
Carolina border, where Virginia’s
once-proud tobacco farms have shriveled like corn stalks
in the drought. After years of tightening production
quotas designed to prop up prices in the face of
declining demand, tobacco farmers have fallen on hard
times.
Several
years ago, though, entrepreneur Jonnie Williams focused
on the fact that some of the most abundant and dangerous
carcinogens in cigarettes, known as nitrosamines, did not
come naturally from tobacco but from the time-hallowed
curing process. Devising a way to cure the leaf without
creating the chemicals, he launched Star Scientific,
Inc., to patent the technology and persuade farmers to
employ it.
In
1999 the Chester-based company signed a contract to sell 15
million pounds to Brown & Williamson Tobacco, a
cigarette manufacturer committed to reducing the
carcinogens in its products. Star Scientific installed
new curing barns at no cost for tobacco farmers willing
to set up concrete pads to set them on, and then paid a
premium for the tobacco which amounted last year to nine
to 13 cents per pound over the average auction price.
Virginia
farmers signed up in droves. Last year, they sold 13
million pounds to Star Scientific, according to Jim
Jennings, vice president of grower relations and a Gate
City tobacco farmer himself. The premium price put about $1.5
million extra into their pockets. Not only did farmers
get more money for their leaf, they avoided capital
expenditures on new curing barns, which need replacing
every 25 years or so, and saved labor in the
curing process.
Star
Scientific is a poster child of value-added agriculture
– a model that just might salvage
Virginia’s
declining farm sector. For more than a century,
agricultural research in Virginia
has
been geared to bolstering farm productivity. It was an
effective strategy for decades but in recent years has
perpetuated gluts and low prices that make Virginia
farming unprofitable and unsustainable in many
commodities, as I documented two weeks ago in “Where’s
the Beef?” Furthermore,
Virginia R&D has generated precious little
intellectual property that could be converted into
wealth-creating business opportunities. The
state, I argued, should
consider reallocating its research resources into areas
that promoted value-added economic activity.
At
the time I wrote, I had no idea what those activities
might be. But it turns out that administrators at
Virginia Tech, one of the top agricultural universities
in the country, have been asking many of the same
questions I have. Over the past four to five years, Tech
has developed the intellectual framework and built internal support for an audacious,
interdisciplinary research initiative that would shift
the emphasis from boosting farm productivity to creating
new, value-added products. The
reason we have commodity surpluses is that we produce
generic products,” Andy Swiger, dean of the
College
of Agriculture
and
Life Sciences told me. “We need to produce crops that
enhance health or fitness or nutrition.
Then we need to maintain the proprietary advantage.”
The
Next Big Thing is to develop ways to promote better
nutrition and food safety across the entire food chain:
farming, processing, packaging and distribution, and
sale to the consumer. The major killer diseases in the
U.S. today -- heart disease, obesity, cancer – are
largely tied to poor nutrition and unhealthy lifestyles.
The National Institutes of Health are beginning to steer
R&D dollars into heading off these diseases as
opposed to treating them once they've occurred.
Discerning an emerging mass market as baby boomers age,
the food industry also is shifting research into the
same areas. “Look at the industry literature. Any
commentary about where research should be done, it’s
all about health and nutrition,” says Tom Caruso,
program development manager at Virginia Tech’s
research division. “Functional foods – that’s the
future of the business.”
Virginia
Tech proposes creating Food,
Nutrition and Health institute to draw upon an array of
departments within the university to improve food nutrition and
safety. The College of Agriculture would be a key
component of the institute, employing genetics,
biotechnology and other scientific disciplines to
develop new food strains.
As
an example of what the Tech visionaries have in mind,
look at what Craig Nessler, a professor of plant
pathology, is doing. He's exploring biochemical
pathways in the lettuce plant with the goal of getting
the vegetable to produce more Vitamin C. With elevated
levels of the vitamin, he says, lettuces will last
longer on the grocery shelf and in the refrigerator. The
added economic value: Grocers and consumers should be
willing to pay more for a product that takes longer to
spoil.
Similarly,
Tech researchers have found that adding capsaicin, the
spicy component of peppers, to the diet of broiler
chicks may increase their resistance to salmonella, a
major cause of food-related illness. The research
could commercialize a technique to reduce food-borne
pathogens in the food supply without the use of
antibiotics. Like Star Scientific's tobacco-curing
process, such innovations create products that food
processors or consumers may pay a premium for, and they
create intellectual property that can be converted into
business opportunities.
Other agricultural research has blended into biotech,
demonstrating how to convert pigs and tobacco plants
into biological factories of pharmaceutical compounds.
The
Food, Nutrition and Health Initiative would extend
beyond the modification of plants and livestock to the processing, packaging and
distribution of food with the goal of improving safety
and preserving nutrition every step of the way. Tech
researchers are investigating a packaging film, for
instance, that can interact with the foodstuff and
replenish its nutritional value. The Institute would
bring to bear economists and the social scientists to
divine how best to alter consumer behavior, say, to
change diets and exercise patterns that contribute to
obesity. Additionally, Tech could mobilize its extension
service to disseminate information and organize programs
that would help translate scientific findings into
healthier lifestyles.
Tech
has pulled together a steering committee of corporations
whose businesses intersect with food at many different
levels, from biotech and pharmaceutical companies to
producers of branded grocery-store products. Heavy
hitters include Monsanto, Cargill, Conagra, General
Mills, Southern States Cooperative, Tysons Foods, Roche
Vitamins, Bristol Myers Squibb, Syngenta and Proctor
& Gamble. In December, Tech hosted a science and
policy symposium that drew federal scientists and
regulators as well as industry representatives.
“We
had no trouble getting the private sector excited,"
says Wayne Purcell, a professor of agriculture and
applied economics who has nursed the Food, Nutrition and
Health initiative for some five years now. "They
could see it. They could see that Virginia Tech could do
[things] on a multidisciplinary basis which they
couldn’t replicate in their labs.” But corporations
aren’t ready to pony up hard funds for research. They
want to see evidence of public support. Tech submitted
the proposal to the General Assembly earlier this year
but collided with the brutal reality of a budget crisis.
Legislators liked the idea, Purcell says, but had no
money to spare.
The
Food, Nutrition and Health initiative represents a
quantum leap forward over past thinking, and Virginia
Tech deserves accolades for the boldness and creativity
of its vision. A food and nutrition Institute could
yield a bumper crop of new research grants, licenses and
royalties for the university. Indeed, according to
Purcell, Tech president Charles W. Steger has made the
initiative one of his key stratagems for advancing
Virginia Tech into the ranks of the Top 30 research
universities in the country.
The
benefits for Virginia Tech are obvious: more research
dollars, higher rankings and greater prestige.
Advocates of the initiative argue also that the public
health benefits of tackling lifestyle-induced diseases
like obesity, cancer and heart disease would be
incalculable. If Virginia
requires a financial dividend from an investment in the
program, look no further than the potential savings in
Medicaid and financial aid to the uninsured.
Undoubtedly, what's good for Virginia's leading research
university is good for Virginia. And I'm all in favor of
improving public health. But I think Virginia Tech
officials need to work a little harder to build the case
for public support. They could gain tremendous political
good will by making the Initiative a platform for
revitalizing Virginia's rural economy. A number of
observations seem in order.
First,
Tech has engaged a number of Virginia
companies in conversation, most notably Southern States
and the poultry producers, but it could benefit from fishing
a bit more in its own pond. Ukrops, the Richmond-based
grocery chain, and Westvaco, a packaging company with a
large presence in Virginia, partnered several years ago
to develop innovative packaging for Ukrops’
microwavable meals - exactly the kind of innovation Tech
hopes to promote. If Virginia
taxpayers support the Tech initiative, they’ll want to
see payback in the form of business opportunities for Virginia
companies, creating jobs and investments in Virginia
communities.
Second,
Tech also might be well advised to begin building
partnerships with Virginia’s
economic developers. Many regions -- especially those in
rural areas -- have identified the food processing
industry as one of their best bets for industrial
recruitment. Undoubtedly, it would bolster their efforts
if Virginia Tech had a reputation as a world leader in
food-and-nutrition R&D. Conversely, economic
developers attending trade shows and calling on
prospects around the world could identify potential new
collaborators for the university.
Third,
Tech needs to focus state-funded R&D dollars on
projects that offer the potential to spin off businesses
and create skilled jobs.
Helping farmers boost crop yields, the main focus of
agricultural R&D today, is nice. Developing
value-added products that pay farmers premium prices is
better. Creating business opportunities that attract
investment capital, pay high wages to skilled workers
and create entrepreneurial wealth is best of all.
Fourth,
Tech has yet to demonstrate that it requires additional state
resources to build its program.
Virginia
has budgeted $57 million this year to the agricultural
research and extension program. Most corporations
wouldn’t hesitate to shut down research programs with
modest prospects in order to fund new a new initiative
with blockbuster potential. Tech needs to apply the same
ruthless logic to its own programs. So far, the
university hasn’t been willing to cull its existing
agricultural research and extension programs much beyond
what it takes to comply with state budget cuts. If
Tech wants to exploit the historical opportunity it has
identified, it shouldn't sit around and wait for the
General Assembly to cough up money it doesn’t have.
Virginia
Tech is in a position to take the lead role in building
a world-class biotech/food products cluster here in Virginia.
Outside of Northern
Virginia, no
region in the state has
a prayer of achieving world-beater status in the digital
technologies that so transfixed the world’s
imagination during the 1990s. But the fields of biotech,
agricultural science and other disciplines have yet to
cohere around a single dominant region. I see no reason that Tech’s dream can't become a reality. I'd
just like to ensure that the innovation and ideas
pouring out of Blacksburg create business opportunities
that help revive Virginia's rural economy.
--
August 12, 2002
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