COLUMBUS, Ohio — The United States Department of Agriculture will invest $33 million to support agricultural programs at 19 historically Black colleges and universities, known as 1890 land-grant universities.

Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio will receive roughly $1.5 million. The money will be used to support three agricultural programs.

According to the USDA, $598,814 will be used to support drone technology research, $600,000 will be used to study obesity and nutrigenomics and $497,884 will be used to study a perennial flower species and its impact on honey production.

"We use these unmanned aerial vehicles for a lot of different things now in farming, and there are even more things we could use them for," Spectrum News agriculture expert Andy Vance said.

Vance also discussed the importance of this investment in the 1890 Land-Grant Institutions National Program.

"Well, one of the things that's really important about the land-grant mission is the idea that we're educating the sons and daughters of the state, so the original land-grant mission, going back to 1870, founded universities with the idea that we want Ohio citizens to be educated in agriculture or mechanical sciences and so on," Vance said. "But in that initial land grant, there were groups of communities that were left out."

The Second Morrill Act of 1890 extended the land-grant mission, making it available to people of color. 

"And so now we have programs at US Department of Agriculture, like this particular funding opportunity, targeted just to those HBCUs to make sure that we're doing a good job of getting resources to everyone who can potentially help advance the science," Vance said.

Click here for a full list of projects.