A research professor at the University of Missouri – Columbia is lamenting the closure of a federally-funded lab that conducted soybean research. Kerry Clark told Missourinet that the lab’s mission was critically important to guarding against plant-borne disease entering the food chain.
“If you don’t continually do research – the insects, the diseases, all that – they beat you in the end,” she said. “They’re constantly evolving, and so you have to constantly figure out ways to beat their evolution and to win that game.”
The lab at Mizzou was part of the Soybean Innovation Lab, a network of research labs across the U.S., based at the University of Illinois. The network of labs functioned as the research arm of USAID. The agency was targeted for massive budget cuts by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is led by billionaire Elon Musk.
A large part of Clark’s mission focused on combatting soybean diseases in Africa.
“Genetic resistance is really ideal, and that work has stopped now in Africa, because there we had a perfect laboratory, basically, for it, because it’s endemic in Africa,” she said. “And so, every year we had fields that were…that would become infested with soybean rust. And so, we were able to really quickly try to develop lines that had rust resistance. And now that work has stopped.”
When asked about it last week, U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Missouri, said his office would look into it.
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