This article addresses two questions: Has the effectiveness of the US government's federal research and development (R&D) spending suffered from the post-1980 strategic change from freely shared and publicly owned to privately owned scientific advances? What criteria would a federal R&D program use to design a strategy that most effectively enhances the wellbeing of farmers and rural communities? Several studies found that the pre-1980 US Department of Agriculture research strategy was very effective. No comparable studies have analyzed the comparative effectiveness of the post-1980 strategy of restricting access to the results of public research. Recent experience and several analytical studies suggest that to significantly enhance the health of rural economies from an expanded use of plant matter as an industrial material, federal policy should channel scientific and engineering research into small- and medium-sized production and processing technologies and should encourage farmer-owned, value-added enterprises. Index Entries: Ethanol; scale; ownership; research and development; effectiveness.