Back in 1998, I was working on an article for the Land Stewardship Letter about how the lack of biodiversity in agriculture was threatening the agronomic, ecological, and economic future of Midwestern farming communities. One of the people I interviewed was Don Wyse, a respected University of Minnesota plant scientist who had recently helped coordinate a task force that had concluded recent crop failures in the Red River Valley were a prime indicator that technological fixes were no replacement for biological and genetic diversity. It was clear that Dr. Wyse, despite his background researching the ecology of  weeds, got the big picture. In fact, I think he’s one of the first agricultural scientists I ever interviewed who talked about the role “resilience” should play in the future of farming

“It isn’t just an environmental tragedy that’s developing,” he said while we sat in the offices of the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture (MISA) on the U of M’s Saint Paul campus. The tragedy he was referring to was how monocultural production had caused major crop disease outbreaks in the Red River Valley, threatening the viability of raising small grains such as wheat. “It’s also an economic, family, quality of life thing as well,” he added. “The resilience is being lost in terms of the environment, but it’s also being lost in terms of people. It’s fragile all the way through.”

When Don died July 2 as a result of injuries from a fall, we didn’t just lose an incredibly innovative agricultural scientist — we lost someone who was a standard-bearer for what the land grant mission is all about: using science to serve the land, communities, and, most importantly, people. And he didn’t just give lip service to that mission.

Don’s contributions to plant science during his five decades at the U of M — from his early days doing ryegrass research to recent breakthroughs in the areas of developing crops that could provide the land in corn and soybean regions with “continuous living cover,” are impressive, and would be enough to label a typical academic career “successful.” In fact, if you know anything about Dr. Wyse, it’s probably in relation to the development of Kernza, an intermediate wheatgrass that is now considered the world’s first commercially viable perennial grain. (Minnesota is now one of the top Kernza-producing states, with 17 growers raising 653 acres of the grain. Obviously, this crop is nowhere close to competing with corn and soybeans when it comes to dominance of the landscape, but it’s a start.)

But his true legacy was contributing to a regenerative farming research and outreach infrastructure within a giant institution that hasn’t always been friendly to agricultural systems that don’t fit into the corn-bean-feedlot machine model of production. As land grant institutions across the nation become increasingly focused on research that benefits an industrialized, corporate-controlled model of farming, science that’s accountable to farmers and the general public, as well as the land, is more important than ever. That’s why it is so critical that a key contribution Don made to regenerative agriculture — co-directing the nationally-known Forever Green initiative and the cutting edge research into the continuous living cover crops associated with it — continue, be further strengthened, and directed in a way that it is accountable, and useful, to the small and medium-sized farmers who are the bedrock of our land and rural communities.

Forever Green’s Roots

How committed was Dr. Wyse to furthering the land grant mission in Minnesota? Well, consider his response when his tenure as the executive director of MISA came to an abrupt end at the beginning of this century. MISA was started at the U of M in 1992 by a group of organizations, called the Sustainers Coalition, as an experiment in creating links between a land grant university and the public. The Land Stewardship Project was (and still is) part of the Sustainers Coalition, and has always seen MISA as a way to provide farmers seeking alternatives to the industrialized model of agriculture access to experts, research, and outreach at the U of M. Despite operating on a shoestring budget, over the years MISA has helped launch and support various initiatives related to sustainable agriculture education, research, and outreach.

Given MISA’s mission to connect farmers to sustainable ag research at the university, it made sense that Don was its original executive director. But, in 2000 he was forced to resign by Charles Muscoplat, who was then dean of the U of M’s College of Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Sciences. At the time, “philosophical differences” was given as the reason for Don’s forced departure, and Muscoplat had made it clear he was interested in gutting or even eliminating MISA as the ag college focused increasingly on research and outreach related to genetic engineering of crops and factory farming of animals. It was a tumultuous time, and there was plenty of animosity between the sustainable farming community and top officials at the state’s land grant institution.

Don would have been forgiven for simply moving on to another university — he certainly had the scientific bona fides to do so. But he stuck around, continued his work with regenerative farmers, and eventually helped launch Forever Green in 2012. He had apparently seen within individual researchers and the farmers who worked with them enough potential to advance regenerative ag from within an institution that at best ignored it, and at worse, was attempting to undermine it.

That’s why LSP and our allies have over the years repeatedly gone to the Minnesota Legislature to push for funding of Forever Green. We see this initiative as a prime example of how a public institution can support a public good in the form of science and outreach that builds resilient food and farming systems. The fact that lawmakers have chosen to recognize this more than once by providing funding over the years gives one hope that regenerative farming systems are getting the attention and respect they deserve when it comes to public policy. After all, it was public funding that helped spawn the revolution in corn and soybean production during the 20th Century, and so public funding will be needed to drive us in a new direction during the 21st.

“None of those things are going to happen without a public investment,” Don told me a decade ago.

And good ideas often spawn other good ideas. MISA and the work to get more continuous living cover on the landscape served as the seedbed for Green Lands Blue Waters (GLBW),  an initiative launched in 2004 by various land grant institutions, along with environmental and agricultural organizations (including LSP), representing several states. Like Forever Green, GLBW is proving that de-siloing the system and bringing researchers, farmers, and others from various backgrounds together across disciplines can pay big dividends in terms of innovative, practical ideas.

In 2014, Don talked on LSP’s Ear to the Ground podcast about the foundational thinking that went into the development of Forever Green. To him, it came down to the difference between agricultural productivity and agricultural efficiency. “We just don’t think the current system is efficient,” he said. His argument was that a system such as the corn-soybean rotation, despite its ability to fill bins, only covers the landscape a few months out of the year. That means such a system is actually very limited in its ability to capture energy from the sun, produce consistent income, and provide ecosystem services. It also leaves the soil exposed much of the year, which results in a plethora of environmental problems while threatening the biological health needed to ensure future productivity.

On the other hand, crops such as field pennycress, which can be planted in the fall and harvested for its oilseed in the spring after a crop like soybeans is interseeded into it, double the income from the same piece of land while protecting and building soil, as well as supporting pollinators. This is an example of a “relay” system where the growing seasons of two crops overlap — as one crop is winding down for the season, another is just getting started, thus increasing the land’s ability to produce profitability 12-months-out-of-the-year, something scientists call “temporal intensification.”

Today, some 16 crops, from hazelnuts to pennycress, are under development through the Forever Green Initiative. But, Don repeatedly made clear over the years, no matter how many alternative crops are developed, it does little good if they don’t make practical and financial sense for farmers to raise them.

“The issue is how to make these systems adaptable by farmers,” Don said on LSP’s podcast. “If you want to change the landscape, give farmers an economic opportunity to change the landscape.”

That’s why Forever Green not only focuses on developing innovative crops and cropping systems, but also the commercialization, adoption, and scaling of continuous living cover crops in the region.

First & Last: The Farmer

Don knew that speaking to the media was key to garnering public support for getting more diversity on the land. As a result, he received a lot of attention personally for his work, including being featured in the New York Times‘ “Visionaries” series in 2022. But he was the first to say that work with continuous living cover crops and initiatives like Forever Green went beyond the accomplishments of one individual. In fact, over the years he repeatedly argued that one key investment the U of M (and the public) needed to make was in graduate student programs that would train the next generation of regenerative ag scientists.

Don was visibly proud when eight grad students sat down with me in 2015 to talk about the research they were doing as a result of Forever Green and why it mattered. They excitedly shared their work with pennycress, kura clover, camelina, hairy vetch, and various other crops and cropping systems. In this room was the future of regenerative farming research.

“I was an environmental studies major as an undergrad and I remember learning repeatedly about the problems, but there was never any discussion about the solutions,” Kayla Altendorf said at the time. “That’s why I feel so grateful and so empowered to learn the skills that could allow me to actually do something about these problems.”

Dr. Altendorf has since gone on to do forage and cereal grains research for the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service.

Through it all, Don emphasized the benefits that could come from working across disciplines to solve the problems associated with monocultural agriculture. He saw Forever Green as a way for not only plant scientists to make a contribution, but researchers from various backgrounds, including agronomy, ecology, soil science, economics, marketing, and processing. The private sector plays a role as well — after all, it’s the food industry that will eventually get a product like Kernza onto the supper tables of eaters on a widespread basis.

And, most critically, Don recognized that farmers have to be key players in that partnership. Perhaps the most fruitful farmer partnership Dr. Wyse and other Forever Green researchers cultivated has been with Carmen Fernholz, a southwestern Minnesota organic farmer who was a pioneering producer of Kernza and who regularly hosts field days on the crop.

I’ve interviewed a lot of land grant scientists over the years, and frankly, it’s clear that some are so wrapped up in the intricacies of the science itself — the genetics, the biology, the chemistry — that they lose sight of the big picture role they should be playing in helping farmers become more successful, sustainable, and resilient. I always got the sense from Don that he had never forgotten that he was a public servant serving a constituent — the farmer — that was striving to fulfill many roles: food producer, land steward, economic engine of a community. Perhaps it was an attitude he retained from growing up on a farm in Ohio.

What’s exciting about farmers like Carmen Fernholz playing such key roles in cutting edge research like this is that it has prompted researchers to fine-tune the genomics, as well as planting and harvesting techniques, in a way that is agronomically practical, and not just “gee-whiz cool” from a purely scientific point of view. Perhaps the best example of that is how farmers have been working with researchers to tweak Kernza plantings so that they blend in with livestock grazing enterprises, adding yet one more level of efficiency.

“To make a farmer feel like the work I was doing every day out in the field was equally as important as the work going on at a premier land grant university became the substance of our bonding,” Carmen told Minnesota Public Radio recently while recalling his relationship with Don. “We could challenge each other yet hold the deepest respect for each other’s expertise and life experiences.”

It’s particularly difficult to lose Dr. Don Wyse at a time when Midwestern farming is being rocked by the extreme weather accompanying climate change, and the negative repercussions of monocultural cropping are showing up in our groundwater in the form of nitrate pollution. In addition, agriculture’s vulnerability as a result of a hyper-focus on producing a handful of crops and removing animals from the land and crowding them into mega-sized CAFOs is becoming increasingly clear.

The good news is Don set in motion a mechanism of regenerative research and outreach that can extend beyond one individual scientist’s lifespan. But such a legacy won’t survive and thrive by accident — there are many forces at work that would prefer that a different form of agriculture dominates our public institutions and society in general. Now, more than ever, the public needs to step up and support agroecological systems based on Dr. Wyse’s vision of building resiliency — on the land and our farms, as well as on Main Street.

LSP managing editor Brian DeVore can be reached via e-mail.