Roger Marshall: “This past weekend, I had the pleasure of joining Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue in Kansas City to celebrate the…”

“This past weekend, I had the pleasure of joining Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue in Kansas City to celebrate the relocation of two of USDA's research agencies to the heartland. This move will save the country's taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in rent and upkeep over the next decade. It will place the agriculture resource center within a 3-hour drive of 19 land-grant colleges, creating synergies in efficiency and research, thus getting more research to our agriculture producers more quickly. From Columbia, Missouri, to Kansas City, to Manhattan, Kansas, to Lincoln, Nebraska, over 300 animal and pet health-related companies dot the landscape. This area is already known worldwide as the animal health corridor and now accounts for over 50 percent of the total worldwide animal health, diagnostics, and pet food sales. By relocating the Department of Agriculture's agriculture research agencies NIFA and ERS to the center of the animal health corridor, and with NBAF's construction in Manhattan, Kansas, near completion, the Kansas-Missouri partnership will truly be the world's leading corridor for agriculture research as well. This relocation places USDA research where it belongs, in the heart of the world's agriculture industry and close to our land-grant colleges, which all fuel and modernize the agriculture industry.…”