A short-term project might look at registering a particular existing herbicide for a new crop. It might take a few years of data to say it's safe and effective, but it wouldn't fund the development of a new herbicide, for example. That takes a long-term effort. It wouldn't fund the development of a new crop variety. Again, that takes a long-term effort for those kinds of things. Even once you have a new idea and a new application, the process of commercialization is multi-step, and it sometimes takes a whole new set of skills for that to happen.
You're right, there needs to be a mixture of funding opportunities and timelines there.
I think that the short term is sometimes a little more obvious, because it's solving problems on a go-forward question. Do we use it for this or do we not use it for that? And so it sometimes seems as if it's a little more immediately applicable.