Beltsville Agricultural Research Center has impacted food safety, nutrition

For more than a century, the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center -- called BARC -- has generated scientific discoveries that improved farmers’ productivity, food safety and human nutrition. That would end under the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s plan to close BARC and to downsize USDA’s Washington-area staff, sending more than half its 46-hundred employees from the DC region to four other states -- or laying some of them off. BARC sits on 65-hundred acres in the same area of northern Princes Georges County as NASA and the Patuxent Research Refuge. Joanne Wilson, who lives in Laurel, worked as a support scientist at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center for 33 years, until twelve years ago. We ask her about it.