CHAMPAIGN — Peter Goldsmith received notice in late January that the Soybean Innovation Lab he directs at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign would soon lose all of its federal funding.
Goldsmith had to tell his 30 employees they would be out of work shortly and tell research partners across Africa that its operations would come to a halt. The lab didn’t even have money to water its soybean fields in Africa.
One employee, Julia Paniago, was in Malawi when she got the news.
“We came back the next day,” she said of her team. “And it was a lot of uncertainty. And a lot of people cried.”
The University of Illinois’ Soybean Innovation Lab was part of a network of 17 labs at universities across the country working on research related to food production and reducing global hunger, all funded through the U.S. Agency for International Development — until the Trump administration shut down USAID.
Soybeans — which provide oil and high-protein food aren’t commonly grown in Malawi. But the U. of I. researchers have been working to help farmers increase soybean production there to ameliorate malnutrition and generate enough interest in the crop there to create a new export market for American farmers.
The lab’s researchers work in soybean breeding, economics and mechanical research as well as education. They have been hoping to show that soybean production in Africa is worth further investment so private interests eventually move in.
“The people who work at SIL, they like being right at the frontier of change,” Goldsmith said. “It’s high-risk work — that’s what the universities do. That’s what scientific research is about.”
The flagship state campus is known for research, especially agricultural research. Labs and researchers across the university have lost funding in cuts made by the Trump administration. More than $25 million from agencies including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities was cut, according to Melissa Edwards, associate vice chancellor for research and innovation. That’s from 59 grants amounting to 3.6% of the university’s federal grant portfolio.
Annette Donnelly, who just received her doctorate in education, is among those affected. Her research focuses on educating malnourished children in Africa and developing courses to help Africans learn how to process soybeans into oil.
In April, the Soybean Innovation Lab was handed a lifeline — an anonymous $1 million gift that will keep the lab running through next April.
The donation wasn’t enough, though, for Goldsmith to rehire all of his employees. His lab’s yearlyl operating budget before the USAID cuts was $3.3 million and would have kept things running through 2027. But, he said, the money will allow it to continue its research in the Lower Shire Valley in Malawi, a project he hopes will attract future donors to fund the lab’s work.
The April donation saved Donnelly’s job. But her priorities shifted.
“We’re doing research,” she said. “But we’re also doing a lot of proposal-writing. It has taken on a much greater priority.”
Donnelly hopes to attract more funding so she can resume the research she had started in western Kenya, demonstrating that introducing soy into children’s diets increased their protein intake by up to 65%.
She said the impact that funding cuts will have on researchers at the soybean lab pales in comparison to the impact on its partners in Africa, where the cuts mean processors will likely slow production, limiting their ability to deliver soy products.
The Soybean Innovation Lab was funded through the Feed the Future initiative, a program to help partner countries develop better agricultural practices that began under the Obama administration in 2010. All 17 Feed the Future innovation labs funded through USAID lost funding except for the one at Kansas State University, which studies heat-tolerant wheat.
The soybean lab’s office is housed at the edge of the Illinois campus in a building once occupied by the university’s veterinary medicine program. Across the street, rows of greenhouses are home to the experiments being run by the Crop Science Department, where Brian Diers is breeding soybean varieties that resist soybean rust, a disease that’s been an obstacle to boosting soybean production across sub-Saharan Africa.
A professor emeritus who is retired, Diers works part-time to assist with soybean breeding. The April donation wasn’t enough to cover his work. Now, he volunteers his time.
“ If we can help African agriculture take off and become more productive, that’s eventually going to help their economies and then provide more opportunities for American farmers to export to Africa,” Diers said.
Goldsmith draws an analogy between his lab’s work and the state of American agriculture in the 1930s. Back then, as the Dust Bowl swept through the Great Plains, Monsanto or another company could have stepped in to help combat it but didn’t. Public land-grant universities did.
“That’s where the innovation comes from, from the public land grants in the U.S.,” Goldsmith said. “And now the public land grants still work in U.S. agriculture but also in the developing world.”
Commercial soybean producers hesitate to dip their toes into unproven markets, he said, so it’s the U. of I. soybean lab’s job to demonstrate a viable market exists.
“That was our secret sauce, in that lots of commercial players liked the products, the technologies we had, and wanted to move into the soybean space, but it wasn’t a profitable market,” Goldsmith said of the African soybean market.
Diers said federal funding cuts imperil not just the development of commerce and global food production but the next generation of scientists as well.
“We could potentially lose a generation of scientists who won’t go into science because there’s no funding right now,” he said.
Miles MacClure reported for The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.