"So the future may know" is the laudable goal of the new Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum. There is little question that we need to assure we don't take our agricultural heritage for granted and that we do make the contributions of agriculture real to our publics.

This spring a proposed budget was touted at New Mexico's national laboratories as pouring new dollars into technology. The same budget, however, cut formula funding to the Agricultural Experiment Station 10 percent and the Cooperative Extension Service 5 percent.

Federal agencies' research and development funding for space exploration, the environment, basic science and health science has increased anywhere from 23 to 58 percent in real dollars during the past 10 years. At the same time, federal agency funding for agricultural research and extension programs shrunk by 8 percent in real dollars. Is agricultural science not technology?

In our state Legislature, agricultural science is suspect among some decision-makers who don't see a connection between agriculture and economic development. Yet, the agricultural industry is the number two contributor to tax revenue in the state. The industry is growing with an enormous influx of dairy processing plants and an expansion of other agricultural processing and supply businesses. Is agricultural business not business?

Encountering this sort of disconnection in the minds of leaders is one of the most frustrating aspects of administering the College of Agriculture and Home Economics. The integral nature of agriculture to the nation's business and the pivotal role of land-grant universities to research and development of this nation is obvious to us who work in this great system.

Americans spend less of their income on food than anyone else in the world. The latest figures from 1996 show that Americans spent only 10.9 percent of personal disposable income on food. That is down from almost 14 percent 25 years earlier. Despite the fact that we are putting less of our income toward food, we are eating more calories per person, eating out more and eating more prepared foods at home. This is a remarkable story that has its basis in the plenty created by agricultural technology.

The result is that we not only have an incredibly productive agriculture and food system, but 89 percent of our personal disposable incomes are free to be spent on housing, computers, cars and vacations. Every industry and business that vies for the consumer dollar owes a debt to agriculture.

And this is an agricultural industry that is based on the research and development of land-grant universities like NMSU. We have seen clearly in our own state that the agriculture we practice and thrive on can be traced to the Experiment Station and Extension work done to create agricultural industries, whether they relate to the ranching we do or the alfalfa, cotton and chile we grow.

Studies by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service show that publicly funded agricultural research and development in this century had a 35-percent annual return to society--to farmers and ranchers, to industry and to consumers. Why then do leaders even entertain cutting back on this investment in relatively good times?

We need to be careful that while we celebrate our agricultural heritage, we don't lead the public to believe that the legacy of agriculture is memories of butter churns and horse-drawn plows. The legacy of agriculture is our contemporary way of life that is incomparable in its affluence in human history. May we continue this progress for our future generations.