Back in 1984, at the British Columbia, Canada, Annual Meeting of the American Society of Horticultural Sciences, a Dr. T.J. Army of the USDA Coop. State Research Service in Washington, D.C., told a group of horticultural administrators that federal money allotted directly to and solely to agriculture now also had been opened for grants submitted from non-Land Grant universities, such as Harvard and Yale, and that "ag" people would be in competition with these botanists, biologists, genetic engineers etc., for agricultural money.  Dr. Army's last statement was "So, go at it boys!"  Apparently, it was too late to complain so there were no gripes or plans to try to make adjustments.  It happened... and some of these non-horticultural high-tech outsiders started moving into horticultural job openings with their grant money, squeezing out horticulturalists.
Horticulturalists had trouble getting grants, finding that if they mentioned a crop in a grant application such as apple or tomato, there was little chance of the grant being allotted.  Some tried leaving out a commodity name and occasionally (two of 10 tries) got a grant.  It seemed "outsiders" had taken over the "decision making committee" in Washington.  In other words, horticulturalists have lost their identity as qualified to do high-tech research, even though we had been trained and had been doing productive "basic research" since the 1930's.  This also happened in other areas of agriculture.  The trend has broken the close relationship between agricultural experiment stations and the growers and farmers that we formerly had (the new faculty does not speak farmer language and seems disinterested), destroying our ability to work through farmers and get their full cooperation.  The growers also have gradually lost much of their source of unbiased research information.  This trend has hurt the teaching of horticulture in state universities and the training of teachers and professionals in the industry.  We now are hiring people into horticultural jobs with little or no training in horticulture to teach horticulture and do horticulture research.  With less public money, applicants for horticultural jobs must show talent to successfully recruit their own research money.  In summary, the inefficient misdirected grant system in Land Grant agricultural colleges is the basic problem.  How can we get this whole thing unscrewed?  It seems impossible.  High-tech research is needed, but it is out of balance.  I believe only a group of powerful farmers and growers can go to Congress in Washington and get this turned around so we are back to getting adequate annual budgeting of public money directly to agricultural deans, then department heads for them to distribute the funds according to the local farmer/grower needs.  That's the way it was up to about the early 1960's.
In other words, we need an active horticultural oversight group to keep aware of what goes on, look out for horticulture, promote horticulture, and not let us be caught off guard heading in the wrong direction.