My apologies for hijacking the thread a bit....but just to reinforce what I said earlier....UVM PMRC BOUGHT every spout and every foot of lateral or mainline we test at PMRC. We even PAID to have tubing systems installed by maple equipment companies or installers. That includes ALL Check-valve spouts we ever tested. Never got any free....ever. We'll sometimes buy things we're not really that interested in, but have gotten questions about. Those things tend to get used for research for year or two, then discarded. We've sold some stuff back to companies for pennies on the dollar that they turned around and sold at a profit again.Originally Posted by johnallin
As I said, we have gotten equipment donations from time-to-time, but we are always clear that there can be no strings attached on what we do with it or what we write or say about what we find. We have occasionally gotten discounts on items, but that is not unlike what ANY maple producer can get if they buy a lot of stuff and ask for a discount. The vast majority of the equipment we've gotten (at least for the 25+ yrs I've been there) we have purchased outright. More importantly perhaps, no maple company has paid for any personnel time to do research. The maple companies don't "own" us or dictate what we can say.
Instead...we spend a LOT of time and effort writing grant proposals and we are very good at it.
About 1/3 of PMRC funding comes from UVM sources (which ultimately derive from Federal funds, typically USDA Hatch research and Agricultural Experiment Station funding). Depending on the year and grants, about another 1/3 might come from competitive grants (ACER ACCESS, USDA SARE, USDA NIFA, etc.). The remainder comes from gifts, donations, and maple syrup sales income. Less than 5% typically comes from competitive North American Maple Syrup Council grants (the penny per container you might pay for plastic from SugarHill containers).
We have not typically done the so-called "research for $" type of thing that is done in some places, where companies fund specific pieces of research. I'm not opposed to it under certain conditions, but I don't really like that approach much, because I can't see agreeing to keep the results proprietary (meaning the company could choose to disclose or withhold the results if they wanted). We may talk to companies to see what kinds of questions they have, but we do the same thing with producers.
This may not the case with research coming from other places, especially north of the border. It is a totally different system and I'm not saying that is (entirely) bad...but it is very different that what is typically done in the U.S. (with maple) and seemingly could lend itself to bias in some cases. However, I don't know how those agreements and funding arrangements are set up, so who really knows?
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