Beltsville, Maryland, USDA's Living Lab
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Maryland
Beltsville has colonial roots: in sixteen forty-nine, Lord Baltimore granted the land to Richard Snowden the First as part of an eighty-thousand-acre award. For two centuries it was tobacco country. Then the federal government arrived. The USDA purchased a four hundred seventy-five-acre farm here in nineteen ten and steadily expanded it into the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, now covering over six thousand five hundred acres.
Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace in the nineteen thirties, the center grew into one of the world's leading agricultural research complexes. More than twenty percent of the scientists honored in the USDA's Agricultural Research Service Hall of Fame did their work here. It remains the largest agricultural research complex in the United States, a working farm and laboratory sitting a few miles northeast of the capital, conducting research that has shaped American food production for over a century.
