Opinion: When Scientific Funding Dries Up, so Does Our Workforce

When I tell people abroad that I’m from St. Louis, the first thing they often mention isn’t baseball or the Gateway Arch. It’s plants.

From London to Durban, Bangkok to Panama City, people in scientific and policy circles recognize St. Louis as a global leader in plant research. Our city is home to world-renowned institutions like the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and the Bayer Crop Science headquarters — institutions whose research has a global impact on food security, human health and environmental resilience.

And yet, here at home, that legacy is surprisingly invisible. Friends in North City or neighbors in Chesterfield are often surprised when I tell them that St. Louis is a world capital for plant science. It leaves me wondering: how can our kids imagine futures in a field they’ve never heard of, especially one that’s growing in their own backyard?

That question is part of what inspired my team to partner with the St. Louis County Library system on a summer STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) challenge. We wanted to connect families with the science happening in their communities, especially in neighborhoods that don’t always see themselves reflected in the science economy.

This year, though, that program won’t run because the funding that made it possible was eliminated. The National Science Foundation’s Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supported our work, is now one of many federal investments in science education facing a cut and early termination of our grant.

At the Danforth Center, our team used NSF AISL funding to build educational programs in public libraries to reach thousands of families, many of whom had never set foot in a science center, museum or lab.

Losing programs like ours doesn’t just mean fewer STEM opportunities this summer. It means fewer people entering science careers ten years from now. Fewer data scientists, fewer biotechnologists, fewer agricultural engineers. The kinds of jobs that power our local economy and help feed the world.

If we’re serious about building a stronger, more resilient AgTech workforce, we need to invest in the entire pipeline. That starts not in the boardroom or at the research bench, but in our libraries, classrooms and afterschool programs.

Tell our officials in Washington to fund science research and education. These programs are not a luxury, they are the infrastructure that underpins our economy, our health, our environment, and our kids’ futures. The world already knows what St. Louis has to offer. It’s time we made sure our kids do, too.

Read the full opinion piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch!