USDA Plant, Soil, Water Lab at UMaine to Remain Open
U.S. Senator Susan Collins announced Thursday that she has secured a commitment from the White House that the Department of Agriculture’s New England Plant, Soil and Water Laboratory (NEPSWL) at the University of Maine will remain open.
The determination preserves the jobs of scientists, researchers and support staff who work there. It also preserves research vital to helping Maine potato growers, blueberry producers, dairy farmers and other farmers adapt agricultural practices to best suit regional conditions, in addition to efforts to improve food safety, Collins says in a news release.
UMaine plant and soil scientists Eric Gallandt and Ivan Fernandez praised the decision, calling it “absolutely surprising and absolutely fantastic,” in Gallandt’s words.
The USDA had informed employees in March that the Orono lab would close in early July. Collins, a member of the Senate Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee, requested that the department reverse its decision and find funds within his own budget in order to continue research at the lab while Congress finalized the Fiscal Year 2012 budget. She also requested a detailed analysis of the costs and savings associated with closing the facility and transferring employees to other facilities, and called upon the White House to intervene, according to Collins’ office.
“Despite the fact that the President requested funding for the Orono laboratory — the only such research lab in New England — in each of his budgets for fiscal years 2010, 2011, and 2012, the Secretary of Agriculture erroneously labeled the Orono lab as a congressional ‘earmark’ and slated it for closure,” Collins says. “The past several months have been difficult for the lab employees and their families who were told that they would be transferred to other research facilities around the country, including as far away as North Dakota and Mississippi.”
The NEPSWL is USDA’s only agricultural research lab in the New England region that conducts crop, soil, water, environmental and economic research.
The lab generates essential research that helps growers and farmers both adapt agricultural practices to regional conditions and also the implications of climate change for agricultural production in the 21st century, according to Fernandez, professor of soil science and cooperating professor of forest resources at UMaine.
“Securing ongoing funding for the USDA NEPSWL is a critically important and positive turn of events,” he says. “Strategically situated on the campus of the University of Maine, the land grant institution for the state of Maine, the USDA NEPSWL has been an important partner with the university in meeting the research and outreach needs of the agriculture industry for nearly four decades.”
The partnership is even more valuable because of the co-location of the USDA facility with the Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station, Cooperative Extension and the College of Natural Sciences, Forestry and Agriculture, he says.
“In addition, the threat of elimination of the USDA NEPSWL seemed even more of a loss because the laboratory has perhaps never been stronger in both its cohort of scientists and its programs in support of the potato, blueberry and other agricultural commodities in Maine,” Fernandez adds.
Contact: Ivan Fernandez, (207) 581-2932; Eric Gallandt, (207) 581-2933