By Olivia Hart

The State Department will spend $72 million this year on eight Feed the Future innovation labs hosted at U.S. land-grant universities, reviving a research network that nearly collapsed when USAID closed in July 2025.

The announcement on Thursday confirmed seven new labs, adding to the single lab at Kansas State University that survived the shutdown. Before USAID shuttered, the agency funded 17 labs; 16 of them were closed, according to the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.

The numbers deserve a closer look. The $72 million covers all eight labs for this year, and the money comes from leftover fiscal 2025 appropriations, according to Marcus Glassman, APLU's director of governmental affairs for agriculture and international development. The program escaped the Republican 2025 rescission package, and the fiscal 2026 state and foreign operations appropriations bill holds funding at the same $72 million level. The House fiscal 2027 proposal would keep it there too.

"These programs have been at the forefront of advancing agricultural science for the betterment of American producers, for global food security, for farmers worldwide," Glassman said. He also serves as executive director of the Council for Agricultural Research, Extension, and Teaching.

What do the new labs cover?

Kansas State University picks up a second lab, the Feed the Future Sustainable Intensification of Targeted Agricultural Systems, or SITAS, Innovation Lab, alongside its existing cereals lab, which studies climate-resilient cereals. SITAS researchers will work in eight countries across the Indo-Pacific, Central America and the Lobito Corridor, according to KSU.

"Our goal is to turn agricultural research into practical and lasting benefits for farmers," said Vara Prasad, SITAS director, University Distinguished Professor and R.O. Kruse endowed professor of agronomy. "By connecting and bundling proven locally adapted technologies with training, services and markets, we can scale technologies and help farmers improve productivity and profitability while strengthening local expertise and institutions needed to sustain those benefits."

The remaining awards went to Auburn University, the University of Florida, the University of Georgia, the University of Hawaii, Mississippi State University and Washington State University. Several universities describe the awards as running up to five years.

The host institutions show where the priorities moved:

• University of Florida: a high-value crops lab to detect and contain crop pests and diseases in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines and the Dominican Republic — a shift from its former USAID livestock systems lab.
• University of Georgia: continued peanut research, using AI to test advanced peanut lines across a regional network in Africa.
• Mississippi State University: a five-year award with $8 million allocated for the first year, for global aquatic food systems research.
• Washington State University: animal health research, following its earlier veterinary vaccine and animal health labs.

How have the priorities shifted?

Glassman was blunt about the restructure. "The priorities have been shifted to be more in line with the current administration's priorities," he said, citing more collaboration across the Western Hemisphere, less emphasis on Africa, and a stronger focus on commercial integration and private sector partnerships.

Whether State will add labs beyond next year is an open question. "I don't have insight into how State will be budgeting these exactly, but we certainly hope that we should continue to see at least a few additional new labs added past next year, and we'll of course hope to look to our friends in Congress to maybe grow the program even," Glassman said. Hope, not a commitment, is what the record supports here.

What was lost?

The revival does not restore what the shutdown removed. "It's not just that research stalled; it's that the 16 other labs were outright canceled. So we lost those projects entirely," Glassman said. "The real impact we'll see is what we haven't discovered in 10, 20 years, and we can't measure that, but it's real."

That is the caveat hanging over the relaunch: $72 million a year now buys eight labs where seventeen once operated, and the gap in lost discoveries will stay invisible — and unmeasured — for decades.

With fiscal 2026 funding locked at $72 million and the House proposing the same for 2027, the network's near-term survival looks secure; its growth depends on Congress.