The 1887 law that powers modern agricultural science

Agricultural innovation requires more than ideas — it demands acres of land, barns full of livestock, fleets of equipment, and teams of specialists who keep it all running. Few research enterprises are as complex, costly, or foundational as agriculture.

For nearly 140 years, the Hatch Act of 1887 has helped shoulder that burden, providing stable federal funding that fuels discovery across the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Specifically, the Hatch Act provided for the establishment of agricultural experiment stations at the nation’s land-grant universities, where scientists studied and recommended new practices to address farming challenges of the day. But because the statute prioritized and promised continued funding, Hatch funds still empower College of ACES researchers to develop solutions for farmers, their families, rural communities, and beyond.

“Hatch funds are crucial to everything we do, but few people understand what they are or how deeply they sustain our research enterprise,” said Rodney Johnson, associate dean of research and director of the agricultural experiment station in the College of ACES. “We work very closely with stakeholders, farmers, and the public to ensure federal Hatch dollars invest in discoveries that truly make a difference.” 

Hatch funding is matched 1:1, at minimum, by the state. The federal allocation varies between state land-grant institutions and may differ slightly year to year. Institutions also differ in the way they portion out Hatch funds, with many investing in faculty salaries or funding operations on university farm properties.

At about $7.2 million each year, Hatch dollars make up a fraction of ACES’ annual research expenditures, which in 2025 exceeded $88.5 million. However, that steady stream of support to the Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station enables direct investments in people and projects that deliver on the land-grant mission. And in the context of declining agricultural research funding, Hatch funding is more important than ever. 

“That’s why dependable funding like Hatch is so vital,” Johnson said. “It supports innovative, collaborative thinking, future-focused workforce training, and science-backed solutions for today’s grand challenges, including issues related to national security and competitiveness, economic growth, and human health and nutrition.” 

ACES’ forward-thinking funding model

For more than a decade, the college has distributed half of its Hatch funds directly to its academic units, which carefully tailor their research support to meet their unique needs. Some departments use Hatch funds to support graduate students, while others invest in new research farm infrastructure or laboratory equipment. Still others use their Hatch funds to help new faculty launch their research program or as competitive seed grants to get novel projects off the ground. 

“Unlike other federal grants, which fund single projects, Hatch dollars support our entire research enterprise and every one of our scientists, directly or indirectly,” said ACES Dean Germán Bollero. “Each department uses these funds to deliver solutions for its unique set of stakeholders and the public. And reporting our activities back to the federal government ensures accountability.”

Some of the remaining Hatch dollars go into a competitive grant program administered by the ACES Office of Research called Future Interdisciplinary Research Explorations (FIRE), which provides up to $60,000 of seed funding. As the name implies, FIRE grants require principal investigators to initiate interdisciplinary projects with collaborators across the college or campus. The expectation is that these research teams will generate promising new directions that mature into full-scale research programs and scientific breakthroughs.

“Our model gives us flexibility to use Hatch dollars creatively to address emerging issues, such as avian influenza, food safety outbreaks, farm crises, and more. If the funds are tied up in faculty salaries, pivoting to address emerging threats or opportunities can be difficult,” Johnson said. “Our approach has also led to a great deal of success for our faculty in achieving larger federal grants, which can be very impactful in finding meaningful solutions.”

FIRE: Igniting partnerships and progress

For small grains breeder Juan Arbelaez, the FIRE program has been a win-win-win. His 2024 project not only gave him practice writing grant proposals, it yielded the collaborative relationships and preliminary data needed to apply for two larger federal grants to continue the work. His project, which focused on breeding strategies for intercropped oats and peas, also led to two scholarly publications for a graduate student that the grant supported. 

“From writing the grant to looking for partners in ACES to training my graduate student, it was just a good exercise that prepared me well for submitting a federal grant,” said Arbelaez, an assistant professor in the Department of Crop Sciences. “Also, I started this about a year ahead of when many of my colleagues started thinking about applying for federal grants for intercropping. I was able to say, ‘Oh, we're already doing that.’ And we already knew how to avoid the pitfalls because we got our learning curve out of the way during the first year of our FIRE project.”

More importantly, the project is helping Arbelaez develop improved varieties for farmers looking to optimize high-protein forage production and nitrogen-fixing cover crops. But this is just one example of FIRE grants supporting discoveries relevant to Illinois agriculture — others have worked to enhance soybean photosynthetic efficiency, reduce corn pests, and protect soil resources.  

While agricultural projects are top-of-mind for the Hatch Act, FIRE grants support research on everything from food safety to natural ecosystems to human health and nutrition to family and community support — everything ACES represents. 

For example, food science and human nutrition professor Zeynep Madak-Erdogan’s multiple FIRE grants have focused on improving breast cancer therapy and understanding geospatial disparities of cancer incidence. Recently, she leveraged preliminary data and collaborations established through her FIRE projects to secure funding from the National Institutes of Health. That work led to discoveries on how neighborhood violence impacts lung cancer progression.

“One of our FIRE projects showed that link initially. It was quite a novel finding, and it led us to think about neighborhood exposures and how they may be perceived by the body, how that is turned into stress, and then how that stress affects cancer or maternal health outcomes,” she said. “That was a big leap for us, and it wouldn't have been possible without those initial FIRE projects.”

Human development and family studies professor Nancy McElwain is also a repeat FIRE grant awardee. As part of her FIRE projects, her team developed a wearable sensor for infants to measure stress and other non-verbal health cues. 

McElwain said the FIRE program provided the impetus to initiate collaborations across campus with linguists, neuroscientists, and computer and electrical engineers. “Through these collaborations, our teams were successful in obtaining grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health to unpack the micro-temporal processes of infant-caregiver interactions that undergird infants’ abilities to regulate stress in everyday situations and real-world environments.”

Evolving science, enduring mission

In June, proposed budget cuts would have eliminated Hatch funds, which are administered through the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“Even though that budget line item was quickly restored, it had some of our closest stakeholders asking valid questions about what Hatch funding is used for and why the overhead cost of research is so high,” Johnson said. “It demonstrated a lack of understanding that, frankly, is our responsibility to address — we need to be intentional in explaining the land grant mission and how these federal dollars deliver taxpayer and stakeholder value.”

While the Hatch Act originally required campuses to physically carve out land for agricultural research, today’s agricultural experiment stations have become a more abstract concept. The College of ACES still operates thousands of acres of farmland for research, but cancer treatments and wearable sensors for infants aren’t tested on the farm. ACES’ laboratories and bioprocessing facilities; its child development lab, student-run restaurants, and greenhouses; and its collaborative research groups are all ways in which ACES has met the needs of the modern era with the help of a 140-year-old law. 

“Along with every other land-grant institution, we have grown and evolved with the times, but we are still — and will always be — here to respond with science-backed solutions to society’s needs,” Bollero said. “That’s who we are at ACES.”