Kansas State lost $50 million in U.S. Agency for International Development funding for Kansas State’s Climate Resilient Sustainable Intensification Innovation Lab in 2025.
The cancellation is the latest development from Executive Order 14169, Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid, which ordered a blanket pause and review of all U.S. foreign aid.
According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s X post on Monday, 83% of USAID programs were canceled in this review.
The Sustainable Intensification Lab was one of two operating Feed the Future labs run by K-State. The other — the Climate Resilient Cereals Innovation Lab — was issued a stop-work order in January, but interim lab director Dr. Timothy Dalton has not received a “termination notice.”
“I’m operating under a stop work order at the present time, and we’re waiting to see what to do next,” Dalton said.
K-State received $125 million in USAID funding in the last 20 years to fund agricultural research.
The Cereals Innovation Lab was awarded $22 million in USAID funding in October 2023, with a ceiling of up to $37 million. The K-State-led lab aims to advance the breeding of four major world crops — sorghum, millet, wheat and rice — and includes multiple partners at U.S. universities and internationally.
Dalton said agricultural solutions discovered internationally cause spillover benefits — positive effects of economic activity that benefit people who are not directly involved in the activity — in the U.S.
“We’re dealing with drought here in Kansas,” Dalton said. “Well, guess what? They’re dealing with that in Ethiopia, they’re dealing with that in Senegal, and Senegal is the greatest natural laboratory there is. It’s always hot, it’s always dry there, and so they’re constantly being hit by all of this pressure from heat and drought … The old saying that people use is that a good year for farmers in Kansas is a bad year for researchers because we don’t see the problems, but a bad year for farmers is when they’ve got a lot of pests, [and] a lot of drought. That’s great for researchers because that’s what we’re looking for in order to develop defense mechanisms for them.”
A 2007 U.S. Department of Agriculture study showed every $1 spent on agricultural research contributed $10 to the U.S. economy.
Dalton said the USAID program cancellations could leave the U.S. unprepared to solve agricultural problems in the future.
“I worry that we’re getting behind the eight ball in terms of the potential problems that we may need to confront,” Dalton said. “And let’s face it, agriculture research moves slowly. We’re not in a controlled laboratory. We can plant a crop once a year, twice a year, in some places, and so we’re at the mercy of the cropping cycle. If something happens, it’s going to take a fair amount of time, five, six years or so, to address that problem when we already have solutions in our back pocket.”
Dalton said one project utilized 50 years of research to eliminate a sugarcane aphid pest outbreak in North America after discovering a solution in South Africa.
“We’ve got a very clear example of where we were working on that in southern Africa, that specific pest, and about a decade and a half to two decades later, it arrived in the U.S. in the Gulf Coast,” Dalton said. “We already knew what worked, what was effective against it, so we were able to implement that [solution] very, very rapidly, and we don’t talk about that pest anymore.”