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USDA climate science research quashed US science leadership destroyed
Last night, Rachel Maddow did her opening piece on the history of scientific excellence and global leadership by the USDA its decimation at the hands of the Trump administration and USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue – and in particular the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), the principal in-house research agency of the USDA. She highlighted this Politico story:
Agriculture Department buries studies showing dangers of climate change The Trump administration has stopped promoting government-funded research into how higher temperatures can damage crops and pose health risks. By Helena Bottemiller Evich. 06/23/2019.
The Trump administration has refused to publicize dozens of government-funded studies that carry warnings about the effects of climate change, defying a longstanding practice of touting such findings by the Agriculture Department’s acclaimed in-house scientists.
Beyond the willful obfuscation and burying of important research findings about climate change, Maddow also highlighted a Washington Post article published yesterday that noted that USDA scientists were also recently given a choice: move to Kansas City by July 15 or be fired – somehow it sounds even worse when using the administration’s term: “be separated by adverse action procedures.” This forced move could cause a massive brain drain and decimate the scientific staff at the ARS, the Economic Research Service, and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (Maddow stated that perhaps 90% of scientists would leave the USDA!).
Talk about information loss!
Found and liberated: Deleted APHIS Annual Reports From Animal-Experimentation Facilities
Last week, we posted that the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service had announced that it was removing from its Website “inspection reports, regulatory correspondence, research facility annual reports, and enforcement records that have not received final adjudication.”
Russ Kick of the MemoryHole blog has now published thousands of these reports, which he had downloaded last summer and deposited in the Internet Archive. These include Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) reports concerning animal welfare at zoos, circuses, aquariums, puppy mills, etc., as well as their archive of annual reports filed by facilities that experiment on animals.
There are still extant deleted APHIS files out there – including inspection reports and enforcement records. If found, please send them to Russ. More of the story is over at Motherboard this page, plus 2,600 individual annual report PDFs from a wide time period here and here.)
via Deleted APHIS Annual Reports From Animal-Experimentation Facilities — The Memory Hole 2.
USDA has removed reports on commercial dog and horse breeders
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service announced today that it “will remove from its website inspection reports, regulatory correspondence, research facility annual reports, and enforcement records that have not received final adjudication.” In a bulletin posted on govdelivery.com, APHIS said that this was the outcome of a comprehensive review during the past year of the information it posts publicly and that it “has implemented actions to remove certain personal information from documents it posts on APHIS’ website involving the Horse Protection Act and the Animal Welfare Act.”
The Associated Press quoted a USDA spokeswoman as saying that the information was removed from the site around 11 a.m. Friday, but noted that she would not say if the removal was temporary or permanent in the new Trump administration. AP says that the information is used by advocacy groups and other members of the public to look up information on commercial dog and horse breeders, some of whom have had a history of abuse. The AP story quotes John Goodwin, who runs the Stop Puppy Mills Campaign at The Humane Society of the United States: “What the USDA has done is given cover to people who neglect or harm animals and get cited by USDA inspectors.”
The reports, which were once public, are now only potentially available through FOIA requests. The Services says “Those seeking information from APHIS regarding inspection reports, research facility annual reports, regulatory correspondence, lists of regulated entities, and enforcement related matters may submit Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for that information.”
- Updates to APHIS’ Website Involving Animal Welfare Act and Horse Protection Act Compliance Information, USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (02/03/2017)
- USDA removes animal welfare reports from its website By Mary Clare Jalonick, Associated Press, Minneapolis StarTribune (Feb. 3, 2017)
Troubling freeze on science by Trump administration
The news out of Washington DC is not good if you’re a government information librarian or an open government advocate. In the last 24 hours, the Trump administration has put a freeze on EPA grants and contracts and ordered USDA science researchers to “cease publication of ‘outward facing’ documents and news releases.” Not only does this have a massive negative impact on scientific research — and the thousands of researchers and students who rely on federal grants to do their work and live on a day-to-day basis! — but it also shuts the door on our government’s communication with its citizens. Stay tuned and aware that this is going on, and by all means contact your representatives to let them know that this is NOT all right!
USDA restricting access to 7,584 fruit paintings
Here’s another story of a digitization effort that’s not been made publicly available. USDA’s National Agricultural Library hosts the Pomological Watercolor Collection, which contains 7,584 historical — and beautiful! — agricultural watercolor paintings of different varieties of fruits and nuts, commissioned between 1886 and 1942. Through a grant from an environmental non-profit called The Ceres Trust, USDA has digitized the paintings, but are only giving access to low-quality previews of them. The public can request up to three high-quality scans free of charge, but must pay $10 per file beyond that. USDA says that a “portion of the proceeds supports the conservation treatment of fragile materials.”
Conservation treatment is expensive and time consuming, but necessary. But it’s clear from the FOIA request submitted by Parker Higgins (who posted the images and story) of USDA that the revenues USDA is collecting for access to high-resolution images is neither recouping the cost of digitization nor paying for conservation treatments. So I call on USDA to 1) release these 7,584 paintings to the public domain where they should be; and 2) request adequate budget from Congress to properly conserve these important historical paintings.
The USDA’s National Agricultural Library hosts the Pomological Watercolor Collection, which contains images of different varieties of fruits and nuts, commissioned between 1886 and 1942.
They’re remarkable as art, and also have serious scientific importance: they are some of the only documentation, for example, of thousands of apple types that no longer exist. The USDA has called the Pomological Watercolor Collection “Perhaps the most attractive as well as historically important of NAL’s treasures,” and it was cited just this week in a Washington State University article about apple preservation efforts.
The public should have access to these images, and that access should be automatic and unrestricted. Fortunately, that is technically possible: the USDA, through a grant from an environmental non-profit called The Ceres Trust, went though a multi-year digitization effort and now has high-quality scans of every image. However, members of the public can currently only view low-resolution versions online, can only request up to three high-quality scans free of charge, and must pay $10 per file beyond that.
And though the order page touts the fact that a portion of proceeds will go to conservation efforts, the numbers just don’t add up. I suspected that conservation costs are orders of magnitude higher than reproduction revenues, so I asked. Through a FOIA request to the USDA, I obtained the digitization project report, as well as a breakdown of the last three and a half years of revenues that the collection has generated.
Digitizing the images cost $288,442. Since the collection went online in 2011, members of the public have ordered just 81 images, for a total of $565. That relatively tiny amount simply cannot justify the cost to the public of keeping these images behind a paywall.
via The US government should release these 7,584 fruit paintings – parker higgins dot net.
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