**USDA Agricultural Research Service**

**Assessment of National Program 207:  Integrated Agricultural Systems**

**September 29, 2006**

A team of six reviewers met on August 29-30, 2006, to assess the accomplishments of National Program 207 (Integrated Agricultural Systems) at ARS headquarters in Beltsville, Maryland.  NP207 was formed in response to input from stakeholders at a USDA/ARS customer workshop in Denver in December 1999 where participants expressed the need for more multidisciplinary systems research.  The review team members were:

Jill Auburn, CSREES, USDA

George Boody, Land Stewardship Project

Nancy Creamer, North Carolina State University

Will R.Getz, Fort Valley State University

Mike Hubbs, NRCS, USDA

Bob Nichols, Cotton Incorporated

All reviewers had significant experience conducting, funding, and/or applying systems research and considered integrated agricultural systems to be a significant focus of their work.

The review was based primarily on an accomplishment report prepared by ARS program staff for the period 2002-2006 which summarized more than 115 accomplishments from 23 research projects at 24 contributing locations, comprising approximately $28.7 million and 60.5 scientist years annually.  The reviewers also referred to additional supporting documents --  including the NP207 action plan, the ARS strategic plan, a summary of NP207 projects, and action plans and assessment reports for related programs such as NP201 (water) and NP202 (soil) -- as well as their own knowledge and experience.

The meeting began with a welcome from ARS Associate Administrator Caird Rexroad who  described ARS’s commitment to agricultural systems research as an increasingly important approach that responds to growing stakeholder and societal interests. The panel thanks Dr. Rexroad and the ARS administration for recognizing the value of, and providing leadership and support for, this important program.  National Program Leader Jeff Steiner provided additional background on the program and on the process used to develop the accomplishment report.  The panel recognizes and commends Dr. Steiner’s excellent combination of field experience and national vision for NP207.  We also wish to commend the extremely capable, professional and responsive support provided to the team by Program Analyst Marilyn Low and Support Services Assistant Rosemary Callahan.

In its deliberations, the review panel considered general criteria drawn from ARS program review guidance as well as criteria specific to the NP207 program.  These general criteria are:

1. Did the research advance knowledge?

2. Has the research led to technology that has been patented or licensed, or led to commercialization? (Note: the panel considered management practices more important than patents or licenses in NP207)

3. Did the research influence other researchers, government, or producers/industry?

4. Were major agricultural problems ameliorated, mitigated, or solved?

5. Has the research yielded health, social, economic or environmental benefits to society?

6. Were the accomplishments of the program commensurate with the investment?

In considering criteria specific to the NP207 program, the panel scrutinized the list of desired attributes in the NP207 action plan, and condensed them to three over-arching characteristics that should be present in NP207 projects:

1. Projects should be holistic and truly interdisciplinary 

2. Projects should be participatory throughout the process

3. Projects should ask appropriate questions about broader ecological and social impacts

These criteria are discussed more thoroughly in Section I.A.

The accomplishment report contained a section synthesizing the attributes and impacts of the program overall, followed by accomplishment statements grouped topically according to ARS strategic goals.  The groupings did not stem from the action plan, which was primarily a statement about the attributes of a systems approach rather than specific problems that NP207 expected to address.  Rather, they were developed post-hoc by aggregating accomplishment statements from the individual projects.  We realized that the absence of specific goals or problem areas in the action plan presented a challenge to the program staff in reporting accomplishments in an organized manner. 

Where accomplishments (“problem areas”) did not receive a “high” rating by the panel, it was generally for one of two reasons:

 (1) It was not apparent from the available evidence that the accomplishments met the NP207-specific criteria, as derived by the panel and described below.  We suspect this impression may have been partially due to the report dividing up the accomplishments of an intended holistic program into multiple accomplishments under more narrowly-stated problem areas. 

(2) There was insufficient evidence of producer/stakeholder implementation of the research findings, which reviewers felt was necessary to achieving the impacts of general criteria 4, 5 and 6.  

Although we gave very few high ratings, we believe that there are some ARS locations doing excellent participatory systems research that would justify a high rating if their activities and accomplishments were reviewed together rather than divided among the discrete problem areas.  Some of this excellent work is noted in our review of the individual problem areas.  We observe overall that Auburn, AL, Beltsville, MD, Booneville, AR, Corvallis, OR, Dawson, GA, Morris, MN, Orono, ME, Salinas, CA, and Watkinsville, GA, are particularly notable for involving stakeholders throughout the research process, working holistically, strong partnering, expanding beyond the traditional agronomic staff to include critical dimensions such as economic and policy analysis, and/or adding new systems projects in organic research.  Locations that are particularly strong in many of these dimensions may serve as examples and models for other locations.  We encourage national program staff to use their judgment in identifying exemplary locations rather than relying on our list here, because our ability to evaluate locations holistically was hindered by the format of the accomplishment report.