Right now in our branch we have over 700 research projects under way, and a significant number of those include soil research. I don't know, but I could come back to you with how that's broken down specifically in terms of microbiome versus organic soil quality or inorganics. This is an area in which we're seeing growth. We're in a period now in which a lot of our baby boomer scientists are retiring and we're replacing many of those with scientists from areas of microbiome, areas of chemistry that didn't really exist when these scientists started their careers, and areas of high-speed gene sequencing and informatics. This is the new domain. We still need what we would call the “agronomy scientists”. Those have been around for a long, long time, and we still need them, because we need somebody to pull it all together for a systems approach—knowing the rotation of the crops, the types of crops, and those sorts of things.
On November 9th, 2017. See this statement in context.