Research, Marketing, and Economic Development in the I-29 Corridor

That Sioux Falls paper reports that the I-29 Regional Development Coalition (of which Madison is a taxpayer-supported member) is starting to get the return on its $118K investment. Regional Technology Strategies of North Carolina presented findings at DSU Wednesday. RTS's two big recommendations pretty much confirm what various local economic developers were already thinking:

1. Boost university research.
2. Market the region.

Boosting university research sounds great, but RTS CEO Trent Williams tells us that to achieve that goal (Brenda Wade Schmidt's words), "the state universities need to hire scientists." Oops: was that really the right thing to say when Republicans and Democrats alike are making political hay with promises to cut state government? Remember, a lot of the growth in state government under the Rounds/Daugaard administration has come from the Board of Regents hiring more researchers—including me—to do exactly what RTS is recommending. Candidates, are you sure you want to reverse that process?

Now don't let Dwaine Chapel get on the committee working on #2: he'll put up banners all along I-29. RTS proposes at least creating a website to advertise our South Dakota's urbane East Coast. But continuing the conversation about community branding, Mike Knutson reminds us that advertising is the price we pay for being unoriginal. Create a vibrant culture, strengthen your education system, and energize your local economies, and those advantages will market themselves.

Think of it this way: if you have $200,000, you could hire a scientist and buy a regional ad campaign, or you could hire two scientists. Which do you think will do more concrete good for the community, or in this case, the Corridor?

Down at the south end of the I-29 Corridor, Rebecca Terk is engaging her readers in a substantial discussion of local economic development in Vermillion. She notes with some chagrin that the community's current economic development campaign, Vermillion NOW!, is marked by the same sort of pay-to-play strategy that dictates the Forward Madison campaign: you buy your way into the decision-making process with donations. If economic development groups really want to succeed, they should involve more community members in ways that don't hinge on money. There are lots of community members, from Vermillion and Madison to Sioux Falls, Brookings, and Watertown, who don't have deep pockets but do have deep ideas, not to mention time and sweat they'd be willing to contribute.

The best community development involves everyone in the community, not just the folks with money.

Monsanto Monopoly Stifles Seed Innovation

Hey, Dr. Chicoine! Pass this on at the next Monsanto board meeting!

A couple weeks ago, I gave ag-industry propagandist Troy Hadrick grief for a blog post titled "Uniting Agriculture." The Daily Yonder suggests that the problem with agriculture is that the industry is far too united, behind a few corporate players who dominate every part of the market, including seed engineering. The Yonder crew share excerpts of "Out of Hand," a new report from the National Family Farm Coalition's Farmer to Farmer Campaign on Genetic Engineering.

Why should you be alarmed? Simple economics—monopolies are bad:

The concentration of economic power in agriculture has led to grave consequences for American farmers and rural communities. Today, reduced competition in agricultural markets means farmers face increasingly high input prices and diminished choice and innovation....

For example, four firms control more than 80 percent of beef packing; three firms control about 70 percent of soybean crushing; and three firms handle 55 percent of flour milling. Farms themselves have quickly consolidated since the 1930s. The number of farms has decreased over the years, while the size of farms and the average age of farmers have steadily increased....

Input industries are included in the trend and in fact demonstrate even higher levels of concentration in some sectors. Six companies account for 75 percent of the agricultural chemical market worldwide.

The seed industry is one of the most concentrated in agriculture. The top four firms account for 43 percent of the global commercial seed market, which includes both public and proprietary varieties sold. They also account for 50 percent of the global proprietary seed market. (The term proprietary refers to branded seed subject to intellectual property protections.)

The prevailing leader, the Monsanto Company, accounts for about 60 percent of both the U.S. corn and soybean seed market through subsidiaries and technology (i.e., genetically engineered traits, such as Roundup Ready and Bt) licensing agreements with smaller companies. When looking specifically at genetically engineered traits in the U.S., more than 90 percent of the soybean and cotton acreage, and more than 80 percent of corn acreage, is planted with one or more of Monsanto’s traits.

Under the hegemony of Monsanto and the ag-industrial complex, life itself becomes a patentable commodity. The intellectual property purists will contend that patents on seed DNA allow biotech companies to protect investment and thus incentivize innovation. But the Farmer to Farmer Campaign finds this privatization of research and consolidation of the seed industry has actually reduced innovation:

Utility patents have not spurred innovation in plants. In fact, the opposite seems true, as evidenced by USDA reports that document a downward trend: “Calculations for corn, soybeans, and cotton indicate that as the seed industry became more concentrated during the late 1990s, private research intensity dropped or slowed.” As opposed to driving innovation, utility patents on plants have provided an incentive to expand control over genetic resources, limit access to them, and make access expensive.

The number of independent seed companies, especially small, family-operated businesses and research firms, has dramatically declined over the last few decades. As mentioned earlier, the Independent Professional Seed Association says there are only about 100 independent seed companies left, compared to more than 300 total (independent and consolidated) thirteen years ago.

But all that genetically engineered seed is feeding the world, right? Monsanto's glyphosate (a.k.a. Round-Up™) is the best thing to happen to farming in the last hundred years, isn't it?

...Glyphosate-resistant weeds are now established in 19 states and deemed a serious economic problem, at times adding more than $20 per acre. Weed specialists refer to resistant weeds as a “train wreck” making their way across the country.

...Some of the worst resistance is found in pigweed (Palmer amaranth). Resistant pigweed now infests hundreds of thousands of acres in the Southeast. For example, 70 to 80 percent of Macon County, Georgia, dubbed the “epicenter” of glyphosate-resistant Pigweed, is infested with the weed, and farmers were forced to abandon 10,000 acres in 2007.

Purdue University weed scientist Bill Johnson explains that, “Farmers do not think resistance is a problem until they actually have it.” Johnson points out that new innovation and choice in herbicides has diminished over the years, so farmers have fewer chemical options. He says farmers “think the chemical companies can turn on the spigots and produce a new herbicide whenever they want.” But with Roundup’s success, money has not been invested in new herbicide research.

Troy Hadrick calls for "uniting agriculture," but you don't hear him uniting with his fellow farmers who issued this report on the dangers of seed consolidation. Hadrick's Farm Bureau party line has no room for real grassroots campaigns to protect independent farming. Hadrick only has blog ink for Ag Inc.

That's the "united agriculture" Troy Hadrick is fronting. That's the "united agriculture" that drives up costs, stifles innovation, and puts more independent family farms out of business.

Monsanto and its monopolists want serfdom. Where's Tsar Alexander II when you need him?

Make University Research Relevant: Blog It!

Our man Hunter pines for more applied research from our universities... but he also calls on folks outside academia to pay more attention to the papers our eggheads are currently churning out:

The state of South Dakota has an office whose mission is to help commercialize the research that's going on in state universities. But we believe the responsibility also lies in the rest of us who are working throughout the state to seek out such research.

Here's an example: A Dakota State University biology education student presented research results at a national conference and was a fellowship awardee. The research project was titled "Effects of Plant and Soil Samples on Microorganisms on Corn and Soybeans." Yet we wonder how many people involved in corn and soybeans in South Dakota have read it or taken action knowing the results [Jon Hunter, "The Rest of Us Need to Learn from Higher Education Research," Madison Daily Leader, 2009.11.30].

Hunter makes a reaonable point: I'll bet few if any farmers or elevator managers have spent time reading the academic research journals related to their industry. I'll also bet few if any farmers or elevator managers have spent an enjoyable evening removing hair from their butts with duct tape. The two experiences are roughly similar in pleasure and productivity.

Why on earth would any practitioner in any field want to read an academic journal? Academics publish in the arcane journals of their field to win and keep tenure. They write their articles for a narrow audience of fellow professors who serve on the boards of elite journals. Writing for practitioners is actually viewed as a ding against one's record at some universities. University researchers expect each other write abstract, detached epistles to theory and methodology, devoid of context, specifics, or passion.

My friend Toby and I submitted a paper on this very topic at the MWAIS conference here at SDU last May. Even as we wrote, we struggled against that same urge for fancy academic lingo. We recommended researchers adopt a research methodology called scholarly personal narrative, in which the researcher talks directly about his or her own experience and puts it in the context of actual practice as well as the latest developments in the field.

One excellent way to carry out scholarly personal narrative and produce the sort of relevant, engaging research that Hunter wants is the blog. Researchers (like Lilia Efimova, who researches the Internet) can conduct and write about their research online. They can blog their ideas, their data collection process, their thought processes. They can put rough drafts online, in publicly accessible language. They can even turn on the comments and seek the input of their readers, who may see things in a very different light from the laboratory perspective. They can make their results available to everyone, immediately, with the push of a button, rather than waiting for an academic review process that can take years and results in papers locked away in proprietary journals and databases that folks outside the university can't afford to access.

Some researchers are pursuing something like blog-based research and "open access" publishing. If academics want to fulfill Hunter's desire for more engagement between researchers and practitioners, they should look at the open access model. They should look at breaking away from the insular language and rules of the current journals and speak directly to the general public online.

D.A.T. Research Conducts Invalid Survey on Health Care Reform

One of the things we students in DSU's doctoral program are supposed to learn is how to compose a valid survey. An automated phone survey paid for by "D.A.T. Research" interrupted my studying yesterday afternoon. It was about health care, so I stayed on the line. It didn't take a graduate school education to recognize that the survey will not produce valid results:

1. Question 1 asks about my health insurance. I get two options: (1) employer-based insurance (2) uninsured or one Medicare/Medicaid. What about the millions of people buying their own insurance on the individual market? Oops.
2. Question 2 asks if I'm satisfied with my current policy. So if I'm uninsured, how am I supposed to answer that? And how will the researchers distinguish between respondents who are dissatisfied with being uninsured and those who are dissatisfied with Medicare/Medicaid? Oops.
3. Question 3 asks (and I paraphrase) if I would prefer Congress pass a plan creating a government-run health insurance program that would compete against private companies or work with private companies to lower rates, cover the uninsured, and protect our free-market health care system. The problem with the wording should be obvious: option #1 is portrayed as simply creating competition, while option #2 is portrayed as actually producing results. Oops.
   

The recording was nice enough to say this survey was paid for by D.A.T. Research (which has no Googlable website at all) and even gave a callback number: 888-298-6320. I called back and got their machine, where I left a message encouraging them to clean up the survey.

But unless I hear back from D.A.T. or any of you phone owners out there saying you got a different survey, if you get mail or read Tea Party press releases a month from now citing D.A.T. Research on health care reform, feel to dismiss the results as invalid.

Collegian Questions Chicoine Monsanto Board Appointment

I'm not the only one wondering about the impact of South Dakota State University President David Chicoine's appointment to the board of ag-industrial giant Monsanto. SDSU Collegian managing editor Amy Poppinga (hey! she worked for the mighty Madison Daily Leader last summer!) reports that some SDSU students and faculty wonder if Chicoine's new corporate obligations will taint SDSU's research and mission:

Chicoine was appointed to the 11-person board as an independent member on April 15. Through that position, SDSU's president will help hire, fire and evaluate Monsanto's management. As an independent board member, he said he will provide objective input.

Still, some students and faculty are concerned his position might create a conflict of interest. Monsanto recently donated $1 million for a plant breeding fellowship at SDSU, and according to a Securities and Exchange Commission report, the seed company has given SDSU $222,000 in research grants thus far in the fiscal year 2009. Between a retainer and benefits package, Chicoine will personally receive about $400,000 for his work with the board this year [Amy Poppinga, "Conflict of Interest?" SDSU Collegian, 2009.04.29].

$400,000 a year, just for coming to board meetings? SDSU pays Dr. Chicoine "just" $300K to be the university's CEO. I don't begrudge a guy for making some extra income—heck, if being a corporate board member pays that well all over, I'll do it! But when your part-time gig pays you more than your main job, you shouldn't be surprised if some of your people wonder where your primary allegiance will be.

(The Rapid City Journal explains that Monsanto is actually paying Chicoine just $195K, plus another $195K in stock options.)

Junior agronomy major Shawn Mohr explained the problem this way:

"He is the face of the university.... What he chooses to do, even in his personal life, may affect the way SDSU is viewed by the general public."

Mohr said SDSU could lose credibility as an independent research institution through Chicoine's affiliation with the seed company.

"We won't become Monsanto-tainted, but our research, to other agricultural companies, producers and counterpart universities, might be seen as Monsanto-tainted," he said.

Concern that Chicoine's appointment would compromise SDSU's status as an independent research facility prompted Mohr and five other members of SDSU's Students' Association, to put forward a resolution opposing the appointment. That resolution failed Monday by one vote.

On concerns the Monsanto might be trying to influence South Dakota's biggest university, Dr. Chicoine responds with the howler of the week:

Despite the university's ties to Monsanto, Chicoine said he was chosen for his background as an agricultural economist, not for his position with the university.

"They didn't choose me because I'm the president of SDSU. I think it was due to my professional background and my experience as an administrator" [Poppinga, 2009.04.29].

Right. I'm sure the "Current Employer" line on Chicoine's résumé never crossed Monsanto's mind.

Chicoine insists Monsanto wouldn't have picked him if there were any conflict of interest; after all, he says, Monsanto wants independent board members who can give objective feedback... which is why Monsanto balances all the big-industry CEOs on its board with representatives from the Sierra Club, Dakota Rural Action, and other groups interested in protecting the environment and small-scale, sustainable, organic agriculture. Again, riiight.

MIT to Give Free Access to Faculty Research

In case you don't learn enough reading the Madville Times, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is about to dump a truckload of real egghead reading into your lap. MIT faculty members voted unanimously last week to let the school post every one of their scholarly articles online, where you and I can read it for free.

This is a big deal. Right now, if you want access to university research, you usually need access to a university library. Otherwise, if you're just Googling for information, you'll have to shell out $20 or more to a journal publishing company like Springer or Sage. If a journal or book accepts one of my scholarly articles, I often have to sign away the copyright, meaning that instead of throwing a copy here on the blog for you all to enjoy right now, I have to sit on the text, wait months for it to come out in the published form... and even then, I can't reproduce the text here for free public consumption.

MIT is saying nuts to that.

"Through this action, MIT faculty have shown great leadership in the promotion of free and open scholarly communication," said Ann Wolpert, MIT's director of libraries. "In the quest for higher profits, publishers have lost sight of the values of the academy. This will allow authors to advance research and education by making their research available to the world" [David Nagel, "MIT Faculty Adopt Open Access Policy for Scholarly Articles," Campus Technology, 2009.03.23].

Academic research is not here to support any business model, especially not an outdated proprietary media model. If we want our research to be relevant, we need to make it accessible. That means taking advantage of the Internet, where with the push of a button I can tell 1.6 billion people, "Hey, look what I found!"

Of course, if we scholars are going to write for the world and not just a small circle of fellow academics, it might help if we write more clearly... but that's a whole nother paper....

Learn more: Read the MIT faculty resolution on this issue.

State Budget Cuts: How About Me?

When commenters get unnecessarily personal here on the blog, I like to remind them that I'm not the story; the story is universal health coverage or local housing policy or usurpation of legislative power by the governor or whatever other important issue the original post covers.

But with Governor Rounds saying we might need $71 million of additional budget cuts to balance the state books, it occurs to me it might be useful to put a face on possible reductions in state spending.

So how about me?

I'm a state employee, a doctoral research and teaching assistant at Dakota State University. Each month the Board of Regents sends me (and several other doctoral students at DSU, SDSU, USD, and Mines) a nice check for about $2600. The Regents and the state—i.e., you—also subsidize my tuition (I get a 2/3 discount). In return, DSU receives 20 to 22 hours a week of teaching and information systems research, as well as my continued work on my dissertation and full-time enrollment in graduate classes spring, summer, and fall.

Now I'm sure there's an accounting discussion to be had about how much of my pay comes straight from you, the taxpayers, and how much comes from students paying tuition. So maybe cutting my position would not save as much money as cutting a regular state employee making $31,827 a year. Parse that as you will.

I'm more interested in a simpler question: am I worth it? If the state is broke, and the day still isn't rainy enough to crack open those rainy-day reserves, is it worth paying me (as well as a couple dozen of my fellow eggheads) $31,827 for another year of research and teaching? Or should I be polishing my résumé and selling more ads on the Madville Times?

I'd really rather not be part of the state budget news... but in this case, I am. The floor is open. Your comments on priorities for state spending and investment in higher education are welcome.

Universities, Research, Wonder, and Profit: Finding a Balance

I'm torn when it comes to the role of our universities in economic development. On the one hand, I recognize that our universities are great engines of economic growth for our communities. At the most practical level, here in Madison, a town of 6500 people, Dakota State University employs over 200 people and brings over 2000 grocery-buying students to town every year. More broadly, our universities turn our hard-working students into value-added professionals, more than a few of whom stick around South Dakota to contribute to our economy.

And then there's research. All those youngsters and their professors are doing the thinking and tinkering that can generate new products, new services, and new ways of doing business.

But as I have observed before, a university where scholars focus on nothing but building new widgets and boosting the GDP would hardly be a university. Good research relies as much on natural curiosity and creativity as on the desire to make a buck.

Writing in the New York Times, Janet Rae-Dupree finds evidence of the tension between profit and wonder. She maintains that the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which intended to promote research and innovation by opening the door for universities and their researchers to seek patents for their work, may have had the opposite effect:

In the past, discovery for its own sake provided academic motivation, but today’s universities function more like corporate research laboratories. Rather than freely sharing techniques and results, researchers increasingly keep new findings under wraps to maintain a competitive edge. What used to be peer-reviewed is now proprietary. “Share and share alike” has devolved into “every laboratory for itself.”

In trying to power the innovation economy, we have turned America’s universities into cutthroat business competitors, zealously guarding the very innovations we so desperately want behind a hopelessly tangled web of patents and royalty licenses [Janet Rae-Dupree, "Unboxed: When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder," New York Times, 2008.09.06].

Citing Jennifer Washburn's 2005 University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education, Rae-Dupree notes that universities are finding their pursuit of patents may end up costing as much in legal fees and administrative staff as they may get in returns on patents and licensing. Those patents and the following licensing agreements may hinder innovation by locking up new discoveries, new technology, and new techniques in the hands of just one company instead of leaving them in the public domain where a broad array of scholars can work with them and build on their value. The way we're doing things, innovation may even be driven overseas:

Similarly, exclusive licensing of a discovery to a single company thwarts that innovation’s use in any number of other fields. R. Stanley Williams, a nanotechnologist from Hewlett-Packard, testified to Congress in 2002 that much of the academic research to which H.P. has had difficulty gaining access could be licensed to several companies without eroding its intellectual property value.

“Severe disagreements have arisen over conflicting interpretations of the Bayh-Dole Act,” he said. “Large U.S.-based corporations have become so disheartened and disgusted with the situation, they are now working with foreign universities, especially the elite institutions in France, Russia and China” [Rae-Dupree, 2008]

You might think patent rights are essential to giving researchers and inventors due credit and compensation for their inventions. But our universities and corporations may be finding that exclusive "ownership" of new discoveries can result in slower scientific and technological progress.

Scientific discovery is tricky business. Curiosity and wonder do not respond well to market forces. Universities can contribute to economic development locally and society-wide, but to do so, we may have to* let our smartest scholars labor safely in their ivory tower, insulated from the pressures to make a buck with every new thought.

*Editing courtesy another sharp-eyed reader—thanks!

Eggheads Bring Home Bacon

Mr. Sibson will further lament the big-money educratocracy (I think there's a redundant morpheme there, but that's what I get for trying to speak Sibby's language), but the School of Mines is more than happy to have another half-million of federal money coming its way, thanks to its efforts in scientific research:

The U.S. Army has awarded a $525,000, three-year grant to a South Dakota School of Mines & Technology chemistry professor working on “transparent armor.”

David Boyles is working on polycarbonates discovered at the School of Mines that blend to form a clear, tough material. The product could be used in face shields, goggles, aircraft canopies and other battlefield equipment ["Professor Awarded $525,000 for Research," Rapid City Journal, 2008.08.11].

See? Having smart guys sitting around thinking about stuff can really pay off for the local economy. Nice work, Dr. Boyles!