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Written by Tim Nelson Exec Director PIC on 2008-12-04 10:08:20
Industry funding for research is not about giving money to a good cause and hoping for the best. It’s about managed investment in work by individuals, organizations and institutions that will give the best return on that investment.
When investing in anything from a cup of coffee to a new car the purchaser wants to be as sure as he/she can be that there’ll be a satisfactory outcome from his or her purchase. In our case the satisfactory outcome industry in buying is not a research report (we have lots of those), we’re buying something that will help make a positive difference for our industry. In order for this to happen, industry must understand what it wants and why, and then must articulate this in a manner that can be interpreted by researchers and translated by them into targeted, relevant research programs that produce outputs that will in turn, deliver outcomes that industry is looking for. This is a relatively new phenomena and it is one which is not unique to Canada. It is true that great strides forward have been made as a result of research, but these big steps were not particularly difficult steps; increases in egg production, meat production and the associated gains in feed efficiency are the backbone of research outcomes that have made our industry what it is today. But what we didn’t ask for with the aforementioned increases in production efficiency, were all the side effects of intensive production, the reducing gene pool and resultant disease issues, the welfare and environmental issues – it’s a long list. All of these are problems we’ve created and now have to find solutions for – much harder to do than what essentially boils down to selective breeding programs and better understanding of feed and feed utilization. The big leaps forward are now coming from genetic manipulation and as a result, the creation of unique gene patterns in living organisms which can be patented and used to make considerable sums of money – does this answer why private industry is got into research? If not totally, then the other answer is that the major profit from farming long ago left the farm sector.
As soon as we stopped selling at local markets and at the farm gate we lost the ability to make the greatest return to the farm. Across agriculture farm profits have been distributed into the pockets of the industries that purchase process, store, transport and retail our products for quite some time and these are industries that can be consolidated into single entities, capable of funding their own research for individual company benefit. Increasingly the profit is also in the hands of our raw materials suppliers and as they too can be consolidated into corporate juggernauts, so too do they rely on their own R&D to give them the competitive advantage. All this has happened in the last 100 years – it’s a truly amazing story and in the greater scheme of things agricultural, 100 years is but a brief moment in our history. However, there are elements of our business practice that are not particularly patentable (at least not yet), but they are never the less important elements of poultry production that keep our industry at the forefront of animal protein production and keep producers sustainable. There are also barriers we must overcome; in order to remain out front and in order to address these barriers and capitalize on these elements we firstly need to identify what they are and understand them and then by using the collective investment of industry funds address them.
This requires more work by industry and a lot more work by researchers. Lists of priorities are no use to either party as the priorities will be interpreted differently by different individuals. In Ontario we have an outcome driven Research and Education Strategy developed by industry and managed by the PIC, which clearly identifies the opportunities we’ve identified and the problems we wish to address and the desired outcomes we’d like to see. The challenge now is for researchers to provide work, which they can demonstrate will help us achieve these clearly articulated objectives. It’s hard to “get money from industry for research” as Mr. Yegani suggests. This year (2008), PIC granted a record $845,000-00 in research funding (a 90% increase over our traditional average). This was as a direct result of receiving project proposals that addressed our priorities and promised to deliver results that would help us achieve our objectives. The answer to Mr. Yegani’s question is therefore relatively simple; if researchers want to receive industry funds they need to be selling something we want to buy.
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