Academics across the country say agribusiness has outsize influence on their research

Of course, this money has helped to create world-class courses and opportunities for many students and academics. Nevertheless, some would argue that it has also created an atmosphere in which research that is not directly helpful to the industry can appear to bite the hand that fed it.

In 2017, for example, after 30 years of research into alternative methods of agriculture, the Aldo Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State was deprived of funds in the state budget in a bill signed off on by former governor Terry Branstad (whose own campaign received $88,000 from the Iowa Farm Bureau, coincidentally). It left the institution alive in name only.

Or back a little further, when Jim Merchant, former dean of the University of Iowa College of Public Health, retired, he planned to continue analyzing an existing data set, the Keokuk County Rural Health Study. (Professors are often allowed to conduct research after they retire.) He’d already published work using the same data set to link industrial-scale hog farms with asthma rates in local children. Still, he thought there were more insights to be gleaned from the information that had been collected.

Money wasn’t a problem. Merchant had secured funding to carry out his work. Yet, he says, the administration of the School of Public Health stalled the project in 2014. He was told he couldn’t do research as an emeritus professor, even though it had been permitted in the past.

Then-governor of Iowa Tom Vilsack had asked them to collaborate on a study of CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operations) impact on air quality. The researchers submitted a 221-page response. At the time, Merchant says the collaborators had reached a consensus on the executive summary. “We agreed on every word,” he says.

David Osterberg, professor emeritus in the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of Iowa, and a fellow member of the study group, remembers it the same way. “After the report came out—immediately afterwards—the Farm Bureau demanded that Iowa State professors come to their headquarters to get beat up,” he says. “It was like, the next morning: ‘You be here tomorrow.’ They were livid.”

Shortly after, the public distancing started. A story in National Hog Farmer, an industry-backed publication, quoted several anonymous sources who undermined Merchant’s claim of academic consensus. Then, at a meeting with state legislators, Wendy Wintersteen, the current university president who was then associate dean of the College of Agriculture at Iowa State, said the university was backing away from the report. She declined to comment for this story.

“This is individual work of 12 Iowa State faculty members—not a report of Iowa State University—the work of 12 faculty members, of their individual research,” Merchant says, still indignant years later.

But as he got deeper into the work, Martin says he noticed that researchers were afraid to be associated with it. “We were approached every time we went near a land-grant school—Iowa State, NC State, University of Arkansas. Professors would pull us aside and say they’re under enormous pressure when they get industry funding to kind of cater their research to that.”

Martin estimates that about half a dozen contributing researchers asked for their names to be withheld from the list of authors in the final draft for fear of retribution.

Academic freedom

A number of researchers we spoke to across the country echoed similar concerns. Their experiences range from seeing their published work undermined in industry magazines, to being discouraged from conducting certain research, feeling undermined by their own deans, and one person was even driven out of the field entirely. Another researcher, who agreed to testify in a lawsuit that threatened to hold industry accountable for pollution, saw his position eliminated just before the court battle began. As soon as the plaintiffs lost, he was re-hired.

Of course, it’s not all fear and loathing in academia. Marty Strange, who teaches agriculture history and policy at Green Mountain College in Vermont, says the industry offers tantalizing incentives, too. Industry-backed groups host conferences, pay high speaker fees, and hire academics for lucrative consulting jobs. “Any time you have people who work in the public trust who can freelance and get private-sector money for doing private-sector things, you’re going to get intellectual corruption,” says Strange.

And for a university administrator, balancing industry priorities and academic freedom may be more complex than it appears. Incentive structures for school leaders in agriculture states are entirely different from those for independent researchers. Administrators’ success is measured in part by the money they bring in, and the Pew Commission found that they’ve been forced to rely more on industry money to keep their institutions afloat.

But the change hasn’t gone unnoticed. In 2013, former Iowa senator Tom Harkin revoked plans to donate his papers from 40 years in the House and Senate to a namesake public policy institute at Iowa State, his alma mater. As Politico reported at the time, Harkin’s reason was startling: “He said he was backing out after it became clear he could not trust university leaders to allow unrestricted academic freedom at the institute.”

Academic freedom appears increasingly conditional. But that’s not the premise on which public research universities were founded. They are supposed to prioritize the public interest. Arguably, ag-friendly universities have left that behind in favor of research that benefits their agribusiness benefactors. And for researchers in certain fields, life can be made easier by just sticking to the script.

“If you wish to get ahead in academia—particularly in a land-grant university, and we saw this again and again through our Pew Report—Big Ag has a stranglehold over land grant universities,” says Jim Merchant, the former dean of Iowa University’s School of Public Health who was barred from completing his funded research as an emeritus professor.

Ultimately, he says, “agribusiness has tremendous influence on their research … as a result of that, the administrators and the faculty at these land-grant universities are heavily influenced, if not beholden, to agricultural interests.”