At the North Central Soybean Research Board meeting on February 27 the directors will probably fund four or five projects directed at improving soybean yield. These projects have been selected from a large group of proposals after critical technical review and a lot of board discussion.
The board has many choices of projects to fund. Most of the projects can be easily justified since they support the board’s mission to maximize producer returns by coordinating research and minimizing regional duplication of research efforts.
Finding research projects to fund is not a problem; many soybean production projects merit funding. The challenge is to find projects led by researchers that can provide the leadership needed to leverage the objectives to achieve results that a single individual project, or research group, could not achieve. It is like finding the last few pieces to complete the entire puzzle. The projects that the NCSRP board funds emphasize multi-state projects that aid in the coordination and cooperation needed to solve major problems that impact soybean growers in the upper Midwest region.
One could easily list 20 to 30 high-priority research areas that could be supported with more funding. Researchers would be pleased to develop proposals since additional support can always be used. What is really difficult is to strategically analyze and select projects that need to be funded immediately to develop the understanding needed to solve soybean production problems. The NCSRP’s approach of developing research teams that can propose projects that bring together the most productive researchers to jointly solve soybean problems has produced many successes during the past 10 years. Building research teams that solve problems and create results have been one of the board’s most impressive achievements.
Bottom line; with a larger budget we fund more projects, interact with more researchers, report more results, and have a greater impact on the North Central soybean producer.
