State budget cuts are forcing the University of California, Davis, to trim 72 of about 450 faculty positions in its internationally known ag college.

The 16 percent reduction at the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences will be done through attrition over three years. The cuts will come in its outreach programs that apply ivory-tower science to real-world problems, including pollution caused by farming.

"In the long term, we will have a smaller focus and some programs will have to go away," said Dee Dee Kitterman, executive director of research and outreach for the college.

The good news: "People will disappear slowly," she said.

While the college's academic core should remain intact, UC Davis risks forfeiting its national leadership role in farm research. Over the years, that research has been credited with keeping California's $28 billion agriculture industry more productive than the rest of the world.

The ag college faculty is among the most prolific in the nation, and the college regularly ranks among the top U.S. universities in attracting outside research money.

"We are eating our seed corn, ... really compromising our ability to keep California agriculture competitive," said Neal Van Alfen, dean of the Davis ag college.

The Davis ag college is losing about $6 million -- equivalent to 72 positions -- from its cooperative extension and experiment station programs, which had a combined budget of about $50 million in 2002-03. The types of reductions were mandated in the $99.1 billion state budget signed by Gov. Gray Davis on Saturday.

The new state budget included cuts across a wide array of state programs to overcome a $38.2 billion deficit. The University of California system is planning fee increases to help cover the more than $700 million in cuts it will absorb.

The ag college changes at UC Davis won't directly affect classroom teaching. The college's nearly $21 million academic budget -- linked to enrollment -- is expected to rise slightly in 2003-04 to accommodate more students.

The cuts at the ag college are slated for Cooperative Extension specialists and Agricultural Experiment Station scientists, who investigate everything from animal disease control to water conservation. Both programs are part of UC's statewide, state-funded division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

"We provide that link from the research and education programs ... and bring it right out to the people who are ranching, dairying and growing produce," said Deborah Giraud, treasurer of the California Association of Farm Advisors and Specialists.

Davis officials say they will avoid layoffs, but faculty won't be replaced as they move or retire. Some programs will be phased out in coming years as the college completes a reorganization that started last winter.

"When you lose one-sixth of your faculty, you almost can't keep doing business as usual," said Kitterman, the outreach and research director at Davis.

Van Alfen said he is increasingly concerned that shrinking budgets restrict his ability to replace retiring scientists and professors, many of whom are national leaders. The college's faculty is aging -- 80 percent are full professors, well above the campus average of 67 percent -- and the ranks of new profs are thin.

"We are now likely to turn over (faculty) very quickly and we could lose that preeminence because we have not been building the successors and mentoring the young faculty because they just don't exist," Van Alfen said.

Budget troubles span the nation, said Cheryl Fields, spokeswoman for the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges in Washington, D.C.

"In a lot of cases, this is the second or third year that our institutions have taken cuts (in state funding). They did the easier things last year and now they are moving on to other steps" such as faculty layoffs, she said.

For California farmers, who help pay for university agriculture research through grants, reductions in outreach and applied science couldn't have hit at a worse time.

Farmers are facing increasing international competition -- pears from South Africa, asparagus from Peru, apples from Chile -- from countries with lower wages and environmental standards.

"The only way that California agriculture can survive is to become more efficient, and much of the research that is done by the university is focused on that," said Marilyn Dolan, executive director of the Watsonville-based Alliance for Food and Farming.

Reduced research and outreach also will affect California residents, who have benefited as college programs shifted from crop production problems toward environmental issues such as Central Valley air pollution.

"All these things that the public wants agriculture to deal with, they are taking way the tools we have to deal with them," Dolan said.