NIFA Works to Enhance Food Production

AFRI, NIFA’s flagship program, is the nation’s leading competitive grants program for agricultural sciences. Among its priorities, AFRI funds diverse research, education and Extension grants to increase food production, ensure food safety and security, and enhance human nutrition. 

In FY 2022, AFRI invested $445 million to administer and support basic and applied research, education and Extension programs. The programs expanded NIFA’s existing investments and created new opportunities to address the food and agricultural sciences. 

AFRI at Work 

• In the United States, as well as other developed countries, minimizing food waste is an important aspect of improving food security. Researchers at the University of Hawaii are working on ways to keep fish fresh longer. The team has developed a supercooling technology that preserves perishable materials at below-freezing temperatures without the formation of ice crystals using electric and magnetic fields. Supercooled foods can be maintained in their natural state for weeks with the same freshness factors they had before being supercooled.  
• Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania are developing new feeds for livestock by leveraging the animals’ ability to utilize plant biomass materials as feed resources in producing meat, milk and eggs. This project will use multiple fermentation processes to create new safe and nutritionally enhanced feeds for dairy cows using fruit and vegetable discards and crop residues such as wheat straw and spent mushroom substrates, abundantly available but currently wasted or landfilled.   
• Mechanical harvesting is crucial for the fruit industry, especially given the rising cost of farm labor and the labor shortages. However, mechanical harvesting for tree fruits is notoriously difficult because existing methods, such as trunk or canopy shaking, damage fruit. As a result, a University of California, Davis team is developing a catch and retrieval system for fruits detached by trunk shaking. The multi-level system should reduce fruit damage by catching fruit before it reaches ground level. 
• Poultry is one of the nation’s largest animal protein industries, but currently available vaccines do not provide sufficient protection against emerging diseases such as Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza.  A University of Wisconsin research team is investigating whether vaccines using ultrafine particles called nanoparticles will provide more rapid protective immunity against poultry pathogens. 
• Urban agriculture such as home gardens, community gardens and small-scale agriculture represent a way to bolster community resilience to natural disasters. A major urban agriculture concern is soil contamination with heavy metals and other pollutants. Extension professionals with the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez are encouraging people to expand their food production while providing them with best practices to reduce soil contaminants. 
• Developing the agricultural workforce is crucial to the stability of the nation’s food supply.  A team at Alabama A&M University has developed a curriculum to support junior high and high school science teachers. Using the curriculum, which includes food science experiments and discussions, the team believes the project will foster interest in food sciences careers among students.