Research at Iowa State will be delivered a significant blow this year with recent budget cuts.

With an $11,900 cut to the Leopold Center, a $5,700 cut to Livestock Research and a $795,000 cut to the Agricultural Experiment Stations, programs will have to get by on what they still have left.

“Mid-year reductions are always hard,” said Norman Cheville, dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine who oversees Livestock Research. “You made plans for money you thought you would have. That is always a headache.”

Funding from all three of these research programs was slashed with Gov. Tom Vilsack’s 2.5 percent across-the-board cut announced Oct. 10.

The Leopold Center, a program funded entirely through university appropriations and the Groundwater Protection Act, had its budget reduced from $470,000 to about $458,000.

Fred Kirschenmann, director of the Leopold Center, said although this cut was a far cry from the million-dollar cut he witnessed last year, the continuous cuts send a bad message to researchers, the public and those who provide funding.

“The thing that gets discouraging is that it keeps going on and on,” Kirschenmann said. “At some point, we have to figure this out so we don’t continue to erode the research people are doing.”

Kirschenmann said the Leopold Center will continue working through funding decreases by combining resources and establishing partnerships.

To handle the $795,000 cut to the Agriculture Experiment Stations, Catherine Woteki, dean of the College of Agriculture, said she has outlined a range of options including transferring some staff salaries into contracts and grants, eliminating some vacant faculty positions and targeting reductions in research facilities.