Outside financial support comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, various other federal or state agencies, foundations, industry, and the Cornell Biotechnology Program, among others. The Department currently has 12 regular faculty members , of whom five are women. Several emeritus faculty have active programs. Five adjunct faculty also participate in our research and teaching activities. About half of them are women.
Several faculty have formal extension responsibilities.
An annual vegetable field day dislays breeding materials to supporters from U.S. or global seed companies. Plant Breeding includes several special programs. Genome Database Projects , funded primarily by the USDA, organize molecular and agricultural information about a number of important species for convenient global computer access, including rice, Triticeae, Solanaceae, Rosaceae and Brassica, as well as the rice blast fungus. International Collaborative Project in Potato Late Blight Control, also housed in Plant Breeding, cooperates with other international agencies to lessen the problems caused by new virulent strains of the late blight fungus.