This strategic plan² represents a comprehensive roadmap of national strategies for the agricultural³ research activities conducted by the State Agricultural Experiment Station (SAES) System, and in partnership with others. This document also communicates critical milestones on the way towards intended accomplishments for the System's users (i.e., customers, consumers, stakeholders, agricultural leaders, and decision makers), as we look to new ways to enhance System performance and report on research impacts. Our plan is a dynamic, working document. Periodic up dates will be issued as needed.

Through this plan the SAES System renews its commitments to the Land-Grant University's fundamental paradigm that integrates teaching, research and extension for maximum public benefit. This renewal will allow the System to provide more concerted efforts when responding to publicly relevant issues, which have been voiced in successive citizen engagement sessions.

These citizen-identified issues have been transformed through a process of strategic planning into a set of national agricultural research programs and initiatives. Linking these Systemwide programs and initiatives to the extension System's base programs and initiatives, and to the national strategic plan for higher education, will better assure delivery of customer relevant research results for immediate and future public needs.

The SAES System has comparative advantages that allow it to provide public-relevant knowledge and information. Paramount among these is our long-term collaborations within and among Land-Grant institutions, and our partnership with the federal government through the USDA's Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES). This strategic plan builds on these relationships, and extends the partnership strategy in new ways, to serve the public better.

The System also plans to more broadly define its mission to address better publicly relevant issues, and to provide better research support for the extension and teaching missions of our paradigm partners. Additionally, the SAES System will use the five goals⁴ jointly derived with our federal partners as a framework for planning national research activities, and for reporting research results through mechanisms such as those required by the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993.

The SAES System views itself as an entity greater than the sum of its parts, participating in coordinated project planning and research collaborations within the SAES network. The SAES System is seeking even greater enhanced performance as a "System." This outcome will be realized primarily as:

• Improved scientific quality of our research;
• Enhanced responsiveness to our stakeholders;
• More stakeholder relevance in our research activities;
• Better integration of our research with extension and teaching;
• Better transfer of new technologies to our intended U.S. users;
• A stronger partnership with the federal government;
• More accountability; and
• Greater public confidence in the SAES System.

• Expanding its capacity to engage our customers, to better respond to their needs;
• Reorganizing its national research portfolio, to better address our customers' needs;
• Expanding its use of peer review, to enhance evaluations of scientific merit;
• Introducing surveys to evaluate customer satisfaction;
• Maintaining an inventory of national research capacity, to better manage its strengths;
• Refocussing its research, to better obtain societal, economic, and environmental benefits;
• Building new coalitions, to more fully accomplish its research objectives; and
• More vigorously communicating the System's accomplishments and successes.

• A more environmentally friendly and sustainable U.S. agriculture;
• Increased satisfaction with the harvested and processed products of U.S. agriculture;
• More nutritious and safer foods for healthier Americans;
• Improved quality of life for all American citizens; and
• Stronger families and communities.

• U.S. farmers, ranchers, and rural communities will benefit from increased productivity and profitability;
• The commerce of U.S. agriculture will become more diversified;
• Consumers will have a safer and more nutritious food supply;
• The managers of our nation's natural resources will be more informed;
• Global marketing of U.S. agricultural products will expand; and
• American jobs will be created.

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The SAES System will be viewed by its primary stakeholders, and by the general public, as the premier providers of science-based agricultural research knowledge that is relevant, useful, and timely for addressing current and future problems, and for creating opportunities to further enhance public well being.

The SAES System, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, usinga decentralized network of participants, provides the relevant and appropriate scientific knowledge and the research capacity needed for: an economically viable and environmentally sustainable food, forest, ornamental and fiber production system; a safe, dependable, nutritious, diverse, and affordable food supply; the preservation and protection of natural resources; all leading to a satisfactory quality of life for all citizens and their communities.  The SAES System will work cooperatively with academic programs, the extension system, federal and state agencies, and industry to meet the broader goals of its clientele.  We will do this through the development of new knowledge in the biological, physical and social sciences.

Strategic planning within the State Agricultural Experiment Station⁵ (SAES) System has, for nearly two decades, been primarily focused on describing a national "strategic agenda" of ranked agricultural research priorities. This process has recently given way to a more integrated approach that has brought together the Land-Grant University functions (i.e., teaching, extension and research) to identify common issues leading to action. This "Issues to Action"⁶ process involved a series of regional listening sessions followed by a synthesis of issues leading to a plan of action. The entire activity was premised on determined efforts to streamline collaborations among the Land-Grant Universities, and across functions. This most recent cross functional planning effort has set the stage for a new approach to strategic planning for the SAES System.

The SAES System is interested in receiving comments, endorsements, recommendations, criticisms, and points-of-concern in response to this plan as the SAES Directors organize the System's programs and allocate their resources for the next five years.

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The Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 (a.k.a. the Farm Bill) lists the following purposes for agricultural research.

"The purposes of federally supported agricultural research, extension and education are to-

"(1) enhance the competitiveness of the United States agriculture and food industry in an increasingly competitive world environment;

"(2) increase the long-term productivity of the United States agriculture and industry while maintaining and enhancing the natural resource base on which rural America and the United States agricultural economy depend;

"(3) develop new uses and new products for agricultural commodities, such as alternative fuels, and develop new crops;

"(4) support agricultural research and extension to promote economic opportunity in rural communities and to meet the increasing demand for information and technology transfer throughout the United States agriculture industry;

"(5) improve risk management in the United States agriculture industry;

"(6) improve the safe production and processing of, and adding value to, United States food and fiber resources using methods that maintain the balance between yield and environmental soundness;

"(7) support higher education in agriculture to give the next generation of Americans the knowledge, technology, and applications necessary to enhance the competitiveness of United States agriculture; and

"(8) maintain an adequate, nutritious, and safe supply of food to meet human nutritional needs and requirements."

The SAES System has adopted these purposes as a foundation for this strategic plan.

In addition, the SAES System, in partnership with the USDA's Research, Education, and Economics (REE) mission area and its Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES), and with substantial customer input, have identified five strategic goals⁷. These five goals provide an accurate and well-defined framework for the SAES System's strategic planning efforts, and thus the five Federal-State Partnership's goals have been adopted for this planning process as well.

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In several recent national and regional listening sessions, and through continuing customer engagements, the SAES System has identified a number of customer-important needs and priorities. These have been assembled into a list of customer-identified issues, stated as the need to:

• Assure access to technologies to provide reasonable farm and ranch productivity and profitability;
• Deliver technologies that are integrated, and proven on a realistic scale;
• Develop production methods that are sustainable, and environmentally friendly;
• Resolve public and scientific concerns for agriculture's over-reliance on pesticides and fertilizers;
• Address broad-based public desire for a pollution-free environment;
• Support informed management of our natural resources; including soils, water, air, and biota;
• Assure a supply of nutritious and safe foods for all Americans;
• Answer growing consumer demands for a reliable, secure, accessible and affordable food and fiber supply;
• Give research emphasis to technologies that create jobs, and distribute benefits equitably;
• Assure that U.S. agriculture will remain internationally competitive in the emerging global market place;
• Apply technologies for more precise agricultural production methods;
• Develop technologies that add value to harvested products;
• Find ways to promote development and enhance the well being of all citizens, urban and rural; and
• Meet citizen expectations for help in individual, family, and community development.

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This strategic plan rests on a set of fundamental external and internal assumptions. The external assumptions are:

• Consumer demand for safe, high quality, accessible, and low cost foods and other biological products with a diversity of selections will continue to expand, both domestically and globally.
• Pressure for the uses of land other than agriculture will continue to increase.
• Citizen concerns for environmental protection will intensify.
• Some environmental problems will continue to have links to agricultural practices.
• Science, including agricultural research, will operationally continue to become more global.
• Concern for the continued vitality of our rural infrastructure.

• Federal base funding (a.k.a. Hatch Act funding) will continue to support SAES System activities, and to define the System's membership.
• The leveraging of federal base funds from other sources will continue to amplify our resources.
• The Federal-State Partnership will be expanded to additional federal agencies.
• New types of partnerships will be organized with the private sector.
• Stronger collaborations will be formed with the LGU extension and teaching functions.
• New and better methods will be created for listening to our customers, stakeholders, agricultural leaders, decision makers, and supporters.

The SAES System has a heritage of providing relevant agricultural research for meeting customer needs, and solving real world problems. It is also proud of its responsiveness to agricultural production crises and human emergencies. These characteristics are the hallmarks of the LGUs, and can be traced to their institutional paradigm that integrates teaching, research, and extension. And, it is their public service philosophy that provides the characteristic distinguishing LGUs from other types of research institutions.

Analyses of rates of return on agricultural research investments typically exceed 30% to 50 % annual returns on investments. Comparisons with other forms of scientific research are not available, as similar studies have apparently not been conducted. However, few, if any, areas of research pay dividends that approach those of agriculture. The unique coupling of basic and applied research activities at the SAESs accounts for these very high rates of return.

Considerable experience has been derived from developing the world-renowned Land-Grant Universities, including the SAES System. This experience has led to a number of guiding principles for developing a national agricultural research strategic plan for the SAES System. These principles are:

• A distributed, pluralistic system is essential for successful agricultural research. Centralized facilities for agricultural research are less effective than distributed systems because agricultural constraints and research opportunities are frequently site specific.
• A decentralized system for the management of scientific research is essential for intellectual creativity.
• The Federal-State Partnership in agricultural research has evolved as a special and valuable working relationship. This partnership is attributed to federal base funding provided to the SAES System. It allows the federal partner to participate in decision making at the regional, state, and local levels, while leveraging their investments with non-federal funds.
• The SAES System works in a collaborative mode because of a shared research agenda and because of the incentives of federal base funding, which is allocated to each SAES by formula. The member institutions of the SAES System work together on a common mission. Although each Station is autonomous and independent, each willingly participates in this national System.
• A half-century of conducting highly successful Regional Research Projects on a broad agricultural research agenda provides the SAES System with the experience, and the mechanism, for tackling some of agriculture's most difficult social, economic and environmental problems. These tougher problems are frequently not limited by a state's political boundaries. Regional Research affords the SAES System a great strategic advantage for solving these types of problems.
• The Land-Grant University's paradigm, which integrates teaching, research, and extension, is globally unique, well respected, and recognized worldwide as an institutional paradigm worthy of emulation. Complementaries among research, extension and teaching provides for greater institutional, scientific, public, societal, environmental, and economic benefits.
• By carefully configuring national and regional competitive grants, commodity support, industry grants, and special research grants, along with federal base and state funding, SAES Directors are able to provide for the immediate needs of customers while investing in research for agriculture's future⁹.
• The enduring impact of past SAES allocation decisions, and the need to provide stable support for research projects restrict the speed and extent to which funds can be redirected.

• The ability of individual Experiment Stations to plan scientific research for broad national goals is limited. Individually, Stations cannot and should not be expected to provide precise plans because experimentation is inherently unpredictable, and the scope of the work frequently exceeds the capacity of individual institutions. Rather, the collective actions of the SAES System need to be planned and evaluated for their collective accomplishments and the returned benefits.

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External Assessment - Significant external changes to science are affecting all sectors of research, including agricultural research. Some of the critically important external factors are:

• The Global Marketplace. In the post-Cold War era new incentives for science investments have emerged, with considerable emphasis on global market competitiveness. Today, many nations are acknowledging the need to invest in science in order to remain (or become) competitive in the global marketplace.
• Evolving stakeholder expectations. Commodity representatives, consumer advocacy associations, environmental interest groups, non-governmental organizations, industry leaders, and elected representatives are today more directly expressing their needs and priorities to SAES directors and scientists. In the aggregate, expectations vastly exceed the System's available research capacity. Thus, informed management decisions are needed to best allocate available resources.
• Extension's agenda shift. The SAES's national agricultural research agenda may need to include some research topics that have been previously excluded. This need is most evident in the SAES relationship with extension, wherein several major extension activities are not now well supported by research activities (e.g., Youth at Risk, Managing Change in Agriculture).
• Structural Changes in Agriculture. The merging of formerly separate industries of agriculture (e.g., seed and chemicals) and vertical integration (e.g., poultry and swine) are significant factors causing change in American agriculture.
• Expansion of the Clientele-base for LGUs. Changing expectations of public institutions and the United States' demographic transformation from the predominant rural/farming economy of six decades ago to today's mixed economy has shifted the responsibilities of the Land-Grant Universities. This change has caused a constant tension between providing research for the needs of traditional production agriculture, and the added research responsibilities to address natural resource management, environmental topics, and consumer and family issues.
• Calls for Accountability. Closer scrutiny of public sector investments in agricultural research is leading to calls from elected representatives for greater program accountability and more documented justification for budget requests. Federally, this call is manifested in the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) which requires federal agencies to use strategic planning-based impact assessments as a process for deciding future resource allocations. This requirement is directly impacting the management decisions of the Federal-State Partnership in agricultural research.
• Concerns for the food and fiber supply. The long term sustainability of the nation's food and fiber supply is a standing concern. These concerns are linked as well to concerns for global population issues, and the need to respond responsibly to the growing wordwide demands for agricultural products. These demands are projected to increase in the coming decades.
• A multi-modal agriculture. Simplistic depictions of the structure of U.S. agriculture fail to show the complex nature of the various types of U.S. farming and ranching. Moreover, the diversity of agricultural enterprises is expanding, further complicating SAES System's strategies for meeting public expectations.
• The focus on sustainability. A major paradigm shift to sustainabile agriculture has occurred in the past two decades. This shift in emphasis toward sustainability is noteworthy, and represents a significant challenge for the agricultural research community that cannot be ignored.
• Private sector research. A strong U.S. private sector agricultural research enterprise has emerged, which by some estimates now accounts for 60% of the annual national investment in agricultural research. This emergence is causing a shift in the demarcation of research responsibilities between the public and the private sectors. Much of this change is driven by reinterpretations of intellectual property rights laws that were intended to encourage private sector investments in areas formerly the responsibility of the public sector.
• Public-Private Sector Partnerships. Partnerships between the public and private sectors are evolving to higher levels of collaboration, especially in the "pre-technology sciences" (sensu Huffman and Evenson). University partnerships with industry can also effectively transmit new technologies to the market place and are complimentary to extension when properly organized.
• Declining farm representation. Agricultural technology successes in the past half century have contributed to a decline in the number of people directly engaged in farming. Related to this trend is the consequent reduction in the proportion of elected representatives who are farmers, or even know about farming. This outcome complicates the process of communicating agricultural research needs, opportunities, and achievements to our elected representatives.
• Policy decisions. The consequences of federal, state, and local agricultural and environmental policy decisions will continue to complicate agricultural research choices for program managers.

Internal Assessment - Significant internal factors also affect agricultural research management decisions. Some of the more important factors are:

• Financial constraints. SAESs' financial constraints, mostly resulting from budget cuts in many states and static federal funding, have forced tough management decisions at many Stations. Consequently:

The SAES System has important comparative advantages that contribute to its strength and uniqueness.

The SAES System is:

• Nationally distributed with multiple sites within each state. This distributed System offers a network of research stations which provide diverse environments and conditions for research. Having a System of research stations also permits the early detection and monitoring of agricultural problems and environmental conditions in ways that support the collective agricultural research network.
• A participant in the tripartite mission of the Land-Grant University. The synergism derived from the institutional integration of teaching, research, and extension has substantial and well recognized social, environmental, and economic benefits.
• A component of the Federal-State Partnership in agricultural research. The System's agricultural partnership with the federal government provides the basis and definition of the System's membership and significant resources for programmatic activities.
• A convener for regionally organized research projects. One fourth of the System's federal funding is set aside for Regional Research Projects. Significant effort is also devoted to regional coordination projects, many of which are jointly sponsored with extension.
• Comprehensive in its coverage of the scientific disciplines related to agriculture, when broadly defined. In addition to the biological and physical sciences, agriculture research on virtually all campuses has the capacity to conduct social and behavioral science research, and farm and business research. This comparative advantage is significant for the System, when partnering with federal research agencies, where discipline divisions are often separated as agency boundaries.
• Tied to the international scientific community through many points-of-contact, including graduate education. Former students and post doctoral scientists now working in the international community represent a network of collaborators of considerable comparative advantage.
• Continuous in its fundamental and applied scientific research capacity. Fundamental research supports our future knowledge needs, and the development of graduate students ( a direct by-product of investing in the agricultural research enterprise). The continuum of applied and fundamental research in the System's portfolio helps to maintain the System's capacity to respond to current and future needs.
• Resource leveraged. By virtue of System membership, and as a result of a willingness to work in collaboration with other institutions, the research outputs and derived public benefits from the System's activities are significantly leveraged.
• Capable of listening to its customers. Through direct engagements and through extension feedback mechanisms the SAES System remains in touch with the broad constituency it serves.
• Well supported politically. The SAES System receives strong support from both the U.S. agricultural community, and from the general public. This decades-long support reflects the tremendous social, economic and environmental benefits that are derived from investing public funds in agricultural research.

Management Strategies

To address the Federal-State Partnership's five strategic goals a number of key management strategies will be pursued by the SAES System.

The SAES System will:

• Expand our capacity to engage our customers by studying existing state programs that are recognized as successful, and then developing customer engagement guidelines.
• Reorient research management and resource allocations to focus more on research outcomes and impacts, and on social, economic, and environmental benefits.
• Redefine and reinvigorate the Federal-State Partnership to include other federal agencies both within and beyond the USDA.
• Develop new models to strengthen the teaching, research, and extension paradigm of the LGU to provide enhanced, cross-functional, collaborative programs.
• Organize our national agricultural research portfolio into a set of National Agricultural Research Programs (see later section) to better address the Federal-State Partnership's strategic goals. This strategy will provide:

- Enhanced national planning for our priority research activities;
- Better measurement of our research progress;
- More precise assessment of our research achievements; and,
- Better documentation of our contributions, measured as social, economic and environmental benefits.

In order to better assure successful research outcomes, we are committed to the following management priorities. We will give:

• Greater emphasis to the needs of stakeholders and customers, through expanded consultations, participatory planning, and involvement in program implementation;
• More commitment to effective agricultural research management through performance and accountability measures assuring science quality and research relevance;
• More emphasis to the efficient use of resources through enhanced regional and national planning, and the orderly execution of our research activities;
• A redefinition to the SAES's boundaries, to extend our research coverage beyond colleges of agriculture;
• Attention to the new agenda represented by the Federal-State Partnership's strategic goals; and,
• More attention to the integration of teaching, research and extension through expanded, cross-functional collaborations.

• Maintain an inventory of the SAES System's capacity to solve relevant problems, to ensure that the System can fulfill current and future expectations, and to establish thresholds against which progress can be measured;
• Match the research capacity of the System to the goals of the Federal-State Partnership;
• Assure adequate Federal incentives to institutions, to ensure their participation in the national SAES System;
• Be congruent with the federal partners for GPRA planning and reporting;
• Provide science-based information and knowledge from a diverse portfolio of research activities;
• Verify, a priori and a posteriori, the quality of scientific research undertaken to assure that research investments will be, or have been, efficiently and appropriately allocated; and
• Provide knowledge and services equitably for broad-based citizen appreciation and support.

Strategies for organizing national agricultural research programs will give priority attention to:

• Obtaining knowledge that is sustainable and environmentally friendly, and that allows for the reduction, management, or avoidance of risk;
• Information-intensive systems that place American farmers and ranchers in a more globally competitive position;
• A Systems Science approach to problem resolution, when appropriate, and using multidisciplinary research teams, when beneficial;
• Developing technologies that lower input costs, add value, and/or improve profitability;
• Approaches that align with the nutritional and health needs of the consumer;
• Developing knowledge that increases access to, and acceptance of, U.S. agricultural products;
• Research that provides the alternatives available to producers, processors and consumers; and
• Research that maximizes individual, family and community capacities.

The national SAES research portfolio will be organized into a limited number of program areas. This strategy was selected over other organizational schemes (e.g., issues, themes) as being most consistent with the natural order of research and most compatible with the current organization of our major research partner (ARS, with 25 research programs) and with extension (ECOP, with 7 base programs).

Rationale:

There are currently 33,000 Current Research Information System (CRIS) projects. The intent of identifying a small set of national research programs is to:

• Allow better assessments of current research capacities;
• Improve our planning in the longer term, and;
• Enhance the evaluation of research outcomes and impacts.

Several attempts to strategically define a set of National Research Programs (NRPs) has led to the identification of the following criteria:

• The number of NRPs must be limited, yet sufficiently large to define coherent areas of research;
• Areas of science, when designated as a program, must be reasonably consistent with our major collaborative partners;
• The cost of supporting NRPs must be contained, and no assessments or off-the-top funds should be contemplated;
• Operational procedures must be compatible with existing activities;
• The products and services to be derived from NRPs must have sustained value to the SAES System; and
• Compatibility and consistency with CRIS is essential, to allow analyses of resource outlays by programs, most likely by Research Problem Areas (RPAs).

Two options for forming a set of NRPs are under consideration.

Option 1. Use the Regional Research Fund's authority to create a strategically planned set of NRPs, using the Project Outline request and review process of the regional associations of SAES Directors. This could be done in partnership with extension and ARS, and possible with academic programs.

Option 2. Create a set of strategically selected national programs under the auspices of ESCOP, formed as a set of subcommittees. An existing example would be the Pest Management Strategies Subcommittee.

In either case, Terms of Reference (TOR) would be given to each NRP. The TOR would request an inventory of programmatic capacity, the development of a program plan based on clearly identified priorities that address one or more of the partnership's goals (with stated objectives), and the development of an accountability plan for annually reporting on the impacts and benefits derived from investments in the program. The conceptual model for this set of activities is the plant breeding capacity inventory and the strategic plans recently completed under the leadership of Ken Frey of Iowa State University.

Support mechanisms will need to be crafted to facilitate each program's activities. Additionally, program evaluations will need to periodically assure program performance and direction.
 

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In addition to forming a set of National Research Programs, the SAES System will coordinate a limited number of National Initiatives. Currently, ECOP's Strategic Planning Council supports a portfolio of national extension initiatives. Although some extension initiatives also receive budget development attention, this is not the primary purpose of creating an extension initiative, which is more to focus programmatic attention into areas of needed development.

Borrowing on this idea, the SAES System will sponsor, either jointly with other partners or independently, a limited set of National Initiatives, each with a limited time horizon, and each with the specific purpose of developing an area through focussed attention.

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The process that will be used for implementing the decisions represented in this Strategic Plan will be primarily through Subcommittees of ESCOP. This may require revision of some Subcommittee's charges, or the creation of some new Subcommittees. These decisions are not yet made, but they will occur through a consensus-building process moved by the leadership of ESCOP. Some anticipated future implementing activities are:

• Define an optimal set of National Research Programs, in partnership with ARS and ECOP;
• Identify a set of National Initiatives, in partnership with extension and others;
• Work jointly with extension's leadership on a futuring project (with a 20 year horizon);
• Examine options for enhancing the quality of research performed, through the expanded use of peer review;
• Study methods for the measurement of customer satisfaction, through survey instruments;
• Develop a marketing plan for the the SAES System, vis-a-vis the ESS Strategic Plan;
• Develop an advocacy plan for the SAES System, in partnership with CARET and AESOP Enterprises, Ltd.;
• Develop a national and regional image enhancement plan for the SAES System; and
• Provide an annual strategic assessment of out-year resource needs, in partnership with the ESCOP Budget Development Subcommittee, with the intention of linking ESS's Strategic Planning to Budget Development.

To communicate the decisions represented in this document a set of communication activities will be undertaken by the ESCOP Strategic Planning Subcommittee. The Subcommittee will, once the Strategic plan has been adopted by the ESS:

• Place the ESS System's Strategic Plan on ESCOP's WWW home page for comments and criticism;
• Prepare a pocket version for use by the SAES System's advocates;
• Share the contents of the plan with our functional and research partners; and
• Brief members of Congress and their staff on the plan, perhaps as a series of seminars on "the hill".

The identification of a small set of National Research Programs will occur in the six month interval following adoption of this strategic plan by ESS. Simultaneously, a set of proposed National Initiatives will be developed jointly with the SAES System's partners. All of these considerations will be reported to the leadership of ESCOP, for their consideration and sharing with the broad membership of the SAES System.

Beginning in early 1998 the Subcommittee will initiate a joint futuring activity with a twenty year time horizon. This activity may need to continue for up to three years.

A task force of the Strategic Planning Subcommittee will be asked to assume responsibility for developing a set of options for enhancing the quality of research through the expanded use of peer review. A second task force will be asked to provide a set of recommendations for measuring customer satisfaction through survey methods. Six months will be allocated for these activities, with their activities beginning soon after the Section's adoption of the ESS Strategic Plan.

A marketing plan and an advocacy plan will be developed by the Subcommittee as a whole, once the final Strategic plan has been adopted, and agreement has been reached with our planning partners. These activities may take up to two years.

A regional and national based image enhancement plan will evolve from current activities, and may take up to one year to complete. A task force of the Subcommittee will be asked to accept this assignment.

An annual assessment of out-year resource needs will be done jointly with the ESCOP Subcommittee on Budget Development, if they accept the invitation to participate. This activity will be on-going.
 

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The SAES System's national approach to strategically organizing research activities by programs has several advantages, seen as:

• Cross functional collaborations will become more feasible than are presently possible;
• Working with other research agencies will be facilitated; and
• New linkages to partners and coalitions will foster a degree of national collaboration heretofore not common.

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Progress on the completion of the Federal-State Partnership's five strategic goals will be documented annually through the federal government's GPRA reporting process, once the process and procedures are decided.

Another measure of the plan's success will be customer satisfaction surveys. Information from these surveys will help dynamically drive the SAES System's priority setting process that will, in turn, steer this national strategic plan.

Finally, programmatic success will be indicated by monitoring increases in the resources made available to the SAES System, in response to delivering these anticipated accomplishments.

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Footnotes:

1. The membership of the SAES System includes the State Agricultural Experiment Stations affiliated with the 1862 Land-Grant Universities and the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station at New Haven; and the agricultural research programs at the 1890 Land-Grant Universities and Tuskegee University.

2. The process used for developing the consensus positions represented in this document started with a series of national and regional listening sessions supplemented by other information resources. From these sources the ESCOP Subcommittee on Strategic Planning, which has representation from SAESs, extension, teaching, and USDA/CSREES (i.e., the federal partner-agency), identified a set of issues which were coalesced into a draft strategic plan. Subsequent cycles of review and revision have contributed to a national consensus on these proposed research strategies.

3. Agriculture, as used herein, is defined broadly to include all aspects of food, fiber and forest production, processing and consumption. The term agriculture is also used herein to relate to broad public responsibilities for preserving natural resources and protecting the environment, and serving the needs of all of the customers of agriculture; as individuals, families, and communities.

4. The five goals are: An agricultural system that is highly competitive in the global economy; A safe and secure food and fiber system; A healthy, well nourished population; An agricultural system which enhances natural resources and the environment; and Enhanced economic opportunity and quality of life for Americans.

5. The membership of the SAES System includes the State Agricultural Experiment Stations affiliated with the 1862 Land-grant Universities and the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station at New Haven; and the agricultural research programs at the 1890 Land-Grant Universities and Tuskegee University.

6. See Issues to Action: A Plan for Action on Agricultural and Natural Resources for the Land-Grant Universities. The Board on Agriculture, National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, 1996.

7. Actually, the REE plan calls for a sixth outcome that relates entirely to human capacity development within the REE mission area, and thus it is not directly relevant to this research planning exercise.

8. Maintaining a diversified portfolio of agricultural research activities is essential for optimum scientific and public benefits. This is best done by blending science disciplines, institutional functions, and basic and applied investigations, as is commonly practiced at SAES.

9. For an analysis of these relationships see W. E. Huffman and R.E. Just, "Funding, Structure, and Management of Public Agricultural Research in the United States," Journal of Agricultural Economics, November 1994.

10. The SAES System, as a public institution, focuses on a type of research that is called public good. Public good research activities are conducted in the public interest, and for the most part, are not subject to appropriations by private interests. Private firms will not undertake research and development if they do not forsee a captured benefit. Thus, major public needs would go unattended if the private sector was expected to conduct all agricultural research activities. The SAES System and its federal partners have a comparative advantage in public goods research, and an established record of accomplishment in this area.

11. Selling off a dairy research herd has far reaching consequences for teaching and extension. Likewise, closing a county extension office impacts on the delivery of research results. Canceling a college curriculum diminishes the future supply of "human capital" for both research and extension. None of these interrelationships are today well understood, or comprehensively managed from a systems perspective.

12. The current extension base programs are: Agriculture; Community and Resource Development; Family Development and Resource Management; 4-H and Youth; Leadership and Volunteer Development; Natural Resources and Environmental Management; and Nutrition, Diet, and Health.

13. The 1997-1998 extension national initiatives are: Managing Change in Agriculture; Children, Youth, and Families at Risk; Food Safety and Quality; Workforce Preparation; and Healthy Peolple ... Healthy Communities.

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