By Macy Byars
Federal scientists are still scrambling to find new jobs or relocate across the country as Maryland’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center’s last days of operation approach. Even as their personal lives upend, employees are concerned that BARC’s legacy of impactful research will be left behind.
Earlier this summer, Manan Sharma received an email with some unwelcome news: to keep his job, he'd have to move across the country in a matter of months.
Sharma worked as a food microbiologist for more than two decades at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland, a federal facility just outside Washington, D.C.
“You can't easily replace what BARC is or represents,” Sharma said.
His research unit studied how pathogens that cause foodborne illness enter produce through soil and water, then helped farmers implement practical food safety solutions.
“A lot of people aren't aware of the effort that goes into doing agricultural research, but this was a very unique facility,” Sharma said. “It has a historic place in American agriculture.”
Since 1910, agricultural and food scientists at BARC have created culinary innovations such as shelf-stable butter, seedless grape varieties and the Roma tomato. They continue to develop solutions to fight costly threats to the food industry — such as crop disease and livestock pests — and human health risks like cyclosporiasis.
Yet this flagship U.S. Department of Agriculture facility is slated to close in a few weeks.
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