Changing paradigms in animal agriculture: the role of academia and industry in technology transfer.

Challenges abound for academia, industry, and animal agriculture. Universities, especially land-grant universities, are losing their credibility with the public on whom they depend for support. Industries have gone and continue to go through wrenching restructuring, driven by the realities of the marketplace. On the farm and in the classrooms, laboratories, and field research stations of land-grant universities, agriculturalists face a major challenge-society's growing resistance to science and technology. Technology, especially biotechnology, has become suspect in the minds of many people. Solutions to these and other challenges for effective technology transfer in the future will not depend on a single institution, company, or program. Perhaps the most challenging issue is simply how to unite groups and individuals who have been accustomed to having their own separate programs. In the future, "business as usual"; won't work. Academia and industry are being held to new and higher standards of accountability by their clientele (customers). Academia and industry will need to join forces to increase U.S. agriculture's competitiveness in a global environment that demands that the lag time between discovery and adoption of appropriate technology be shortened.