A Research Facility Closure Could Bring More USDA Scientists To Nebraska. That Could Benefit Research – If The Staff Make It Here

May 06, 2026

By Macy Byars

Some U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers could be relocated to Nebraska under a plan to close a Washington D.C.-area research facility. Nebraska researchers say more USDA personnel could benefit the state’s research efforts, but with few details announced about project and staff movement, how much help they’ll get is unclear.

In July 2025, the USDA announced it would close the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) in Maryland as part of a department “reorganization” effort. In an April announcement, the USDA said it would relocate employees to at least 27 USDA facilities across the country.

One of those locations is in Clay Center. The U.S. Meat Animal Research Center (USMARC) works on animal health, animal food production, food safety, and soil and air quality projects. Its employees work for the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) – a USDA subagency that conducts and funds research.

University of Nebraska researchers and faculty often collaborate with USDA scientists, said Derek McLean, dean and director of the UNL Institute of Agricultural and Natural Resources’ Agricultural Research Division.

“The mission of our researchers to help support Nebraska agriculture, to help develop new innovations, to work closely with them and to be responsive to the challenges that they face, basically on a daily to yearly basis – that mission is strongly overlapped with the ARS mission and their commitment to research excellence and scientific integrity to help in field-based research that can help support our producers,” McLean said.

He said he welcomes any ARS scientists offered relocation to Nebraska.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids