SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
agriculture
Wes Jackson: A Misfit Trying to Change the Future of Farming
Jackson was ahead of his time in seeing not only problems in agriculture but what he called the problem of agriculture, the millennia of soil erosion and soil degradation caused by plowing and planting annual grains such as wheat.
Feb 21, 2026
Wes Jackson’s career demonstrates that sometimes the race goes not to the swift but to the unconventional, that the battle can be won not only by the strong but by the stubborn. Straight-A students don’t always lead the way.
Jackson, one of the last half-century’s most innovative thinkers about regenerative agriculture, has won a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius grant.” He also received the Right Livelihood Award, often called the “alternative Nobel Prize,” in addition to dozens of other awards from various philanthropic, academic, and agricultural organizations. Life Magazine tagged him one of the “100 Important Americans of the 20th Century.”
But mention any of those accolades to Jackson—who was one of the first people to use the term “sustainable agriculture” in print—and he likely will tell the story of almost getting a D in a botany course and describe himself as a misfit.
Not the Top of His Class
Jackson’s education started in a two-room school near his family’s farm in North Topeka, Kansas, where classes met for only eight months because students were needed for planting and harvest. He was an uneven student whose classroom performance varied depending on the quality of the teacher and his interests at the moment. He went to nearby Kansas Wesleyan University in Salina, focusing as much on football and track as on academics. “I wasn’t what you would call a top student,” Jackson said. “I had a lot of Cs and Bs, an A here and there, but also my share of Ds.”
Jackson said the central question on his mind is much the same as when he was creating that Survival Studies curriculum nearly six decades ago—how is our species going to make the transition from a high-energy, high-technology world of 8 billion people to a smaller population that doesn’t draw down the ecological capital of Earth?
One of those D grades came in botany. “I went to the prof and explained that I couldn’t have a D in my major field, which was biology,” Jackson said. The response: “Well, you got one.” Then the professor said he would give Jackson six weeks to study for a makeup exam, and if Jackson got an A on that he would receive a C in the course. Jackson made the grade, and later that professor wrote him a glowing recommendation for the MA program in botany at the University of Kansas, which he completed in 1960. After that, Jackson was back in the classroom, teaching first in a Kansas high school and then at KWU, before heading to North Carolina State University for the PhD program in genetics.
“I guess you could say I was sort of in business for myself, and so I wasn’t worrying about grades,” Jackson said. “I either did it or didn’t, according to what was satisfying.”
Different Routes to Finding Purpose
I was teaching at the University of Texas at Austin when I first heard those stories, and I recounted them to many students, especially those who seemed too concerned about being a “good student” as the path to a “successful career.” Jackson’s story illustrates that we don’t always have to do as we are told.
I used another Jackson story to make the point that striving for the highest status job isn’t the only path to fulfillment. After earning that PhD in genetics in 1967, Jackson had a lot of options, including an offer from the University of Tennessee for a tenure-track teaching job that would have allowed him to continue the genetics research that he loved, at a time when the federal government was throwing lots of grant money at scientists. Instead, he returned to KWU to teach the same biology classes he had been teaching before the doctoral program. Why did he turn down a job at a Research 1 university to return to a small liberal arts college in a rural area?
“I suppose I’m something of a homing pigeon,” Jackson said. “I wanted back to that prairie landscape. And there was family back there, too.” But when pressed, Jackson acknowledged that he still isn’t sure why he made that choice. “I don’t know why I did what I did,” he said. “People would ask me why I turned down that job and I couldn’t give them any decent sort of answer.”
While teaching at KWU that second time, when the environmental movement was taking off, Jackson said students started pressing him to make biology courses more “relevant.” His response was to design a “Survival Studies” program that took seriously the deepening ecological crises, and he also began work on one of the emerging discipline’s first collections of readings, Man and the Environment. By the time that curriculum was in place, Jackson had been hired by California State University, Sacramento to create and run one of the first environmental studies programs in the country. But after a few years, the restless Jackson was back in Kansas on leave, dreaming of starting an alternative school that would combine book learning with hands-on work on the land. He gave up the security of his California job and, with his then-wife, Dana, created that school, The Land Institute, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
Back to my students. After telling Jackson’s story, I asked them whether he had been foolish to walk away from the more prestigious job. There’s no right answer, of course. I just wanted my high-achieving students—the ones who had been earning good grades and building stellar resumes since grade school—to realize they had options, that success can come in many forms down many roads.
A stubborn humility
Back to Jackson, who is a curious mix of humility and self-confidence. He accumulated all those accolades because he never let his critics slow him down. Jackson was ahead of his time in seeing not only problems in agriculture but what he called the problem of agriculture, the millennia of soil erosion and soil degradation caused by plowing and planting annual grains such as wheat.
For decades, Jackson said agronomists politely told him that his plan to breed perennial grains was interesting but unworkable. Today, plant breeders at The Land Institute and around the world are working on what Jackson calls “Natural Systems Agriculture,” growing perennial grains in mixtures. There’s a long way to go before those crops can feed the world, but there are perennial grains in commercial production (especially perennial rice in China) and more in development (such as varieties of wheat).
He called me one morning to describe in detail a spider web between two trees that he had been studying and then asked me a rhetorical question that goes to the core of our ecological crises: “Why is this not enough?”
Jackson jokes that he enjoys people “praising me,” but his humility is real. I worked with him on books that were published in 2021 (my summary of his key ideas, The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson: Searching for Sustainability, and his book of stories, Hogs Are Up: Stories of the Land, with Digressions) and 2022 (the co-authored An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity). I have no specialized training in the areas we wrote about, but Jackson never discounted my contributions. He enjoyed being challenged and always took my ideas seriously. In fact, he attributes his success to his argumentative friends and colleagues.
There’s a story about his debt to comrades that Jackson loves to tell. One day his brother Elmer noted that Jackson was always quoting others in his writing and asked, “Don’t you have a mind of your own?” Jackson readily conceded that he did not. “I don’t know what I think until I talk to my friends,” Jackson said, emphasizing how much he has benefited from the insights of others. That’s the way it should be, Jackson said, because no one has a mind of their own, as we all puzzle through life’s challenges together.
Family Can Keep Us Honest
Jackson was the only one of six siblings who earned advanced degrees, and his connection to his family is another source of the humility that keeps his hard-charging intellect grounded.
For example, when he received his MA from the University of Kansas, his parents made the 30-mile drive from North Topeka to Lawrence for the ceremony, but Jackson said that they left once he crossed the stage and didn’t hang around for the graduation reception. Why? “I didn’t ask them,” Jackson said. “I just assumed they had chores that needed to get done.” Jackson said they were proud of his accomplishments but didn’t consider those more important than his siblings’ work in farming, nursing, and business.
Another example: When Jackson was building the house and structures that became The Land Institute, he was surprised one day to see Elmer pull up with a tractor. “Elmer simply said, ‘You’re going to need this’ and told me that I owed him $800,” said Jackson, who paid off the debt as he had the money. That was typical, not only of Jackson’s family but of many rural people who had lived through the Great Depression, which Jackson said is part of why he stayed close to home, both geographically and culturally.
Jackson, the youngest in the family, is the only sibling still living. This year he will turn 90, and he and his wife, Joan, still live in that house Jackson built from scratch—no blueprints and a limited budget—with the help of family and friends in the early 1970s. After doing his best to ignore the aging process, Jackson finally has slowed down. In 2016 he stepped down as president and in 2024 he retired completely from The Land Institute, which had evolved from an alternative school to a full-fledged research institution, a hub for the worldwide work on perennial grains. But Jackson said the central question on his mind is much the same as when he was creating that Survival Studies curriculum nearly six decades ago—how is our species going to make the transition from a high-energy, high-technology world of 8 billion people to a smaller population that doesn’t draw down the ecological capital of Earth?
A Future?
Can we manage such a down powering? Jackson is not naïve about our chances but wants to help a younger generation continue the work on his property, on The Land. He doesn’t have a specific program for them to follow but hopes they will be open to unpredictable possibilities, most of which he thinks won’t come by sticking to typical career paths.
Jackson said his own idiosyncratic choices simply may be the result of being a misfit. “I have never really fit anywhere,” he said. “I don't fit in genetics anymore. I didn’t fit in the nonprofit world. I certainly wouldn’t fit in any university. And I don’t think I would fit as a farmer.”
Jackson may be a misfit in human enterprises, but he continues to feel at home on his 30 acres of Kansas prairie, where even a short walk reignites his sense of wonder. He called me one morning to describe in detail a spider web between two trees that he had been studying and then asked me a rhetorical question that goes to the core of our ecological crises: “Why is this not enough?” Why are people not satisfied, he asked, with all the beauty, creativity, and complexity of the ecosystems around us?
If that were to be enough for more people, Jackson mused, the human species just might have a chance.
“Prairie Prophecy,” a documentary about Jackson’s work, will air on public television stations around the United States in spring 2026. For more information, visit https://www.prairieprophecy.com/. For extended audio conversations with Jackson, listen to “Podcast from the Prairie” at https://podcastfromtheprairie.com/.
Keep ReadingShow Less
GOP Ripped for 'Grotesque' Farm Bill Full of 'Industry-Backed Poison Pills'
"Chairman Thompson appears poised to check off industry's cruel wish list," one critic warned.
Feb 13, 2026
Advocates for animal welfare, environmental protection, public health, and small family farms fiercely condemned various "industry-backed poison pills" in the long-awaited Farm Bill draft unveiled Friday by a key Republican in the US House of Representatives.
"A new Farm Bill is long overdue, and the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 is an important step forward in providing certainty to our farmers, ranchers, and rural communities," said House Committee on Agriculture Chair Glenn "GT" Thompson (R-Pa.) in a statement.
While Thompson has scheduled a markup of the 802-page proposal for February 23, critics aren't waiting to pick apart the bill, which aligns with a 2024 GOP proposal that was also sharply rebuked. The panel's ranking member, Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.), said that from what she has seen so far, the new legislation "fails to meet the moment facing farmers and working people."
"Farmers need Congress to act swiftly to end inflationary tariffs, stabilize trade relationships, expand domestic market opportunities like year-round E15, and help lower input costs," Craig stressed. "The Republican majority instead chose to ignore Democratic priorities and focus on pushing a shell of a farm bill with poison pills that complicates if not derails chances of getting anything done. I strongly urge my Republican colleagues to drop the political charade and work with House Democrats on a truly bipartisan bill to address the very real problems farm country is experiencing right now—before it's too late."
Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, similarly blasted the GOP legislation on Friday, declaring that "this Republican Farm Bill proposal is a grotesque, record-breaking giveaway to the pesticide industry that will free Big Ag to accelerate the flow of dangerous poisons into our nation's food supply and waterways."
"This bill would block people suffering from pesticide-linked cancers from suing pesticide makers, eviscerate the EPA's ability to protect rivers and streams from direct pesticide pollution, and give the pesticide industry an unprecedented veto over extinction-preventing safeguards for our nation's most endangered wildlife," he said, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency.
"If Congress passes this monstrosity, it will speed our march toward the dawn of a very real silent spring, a day without fluttering butterflies, chirping frogs, or the chorus of birds at sunrise," Hartl warned. "No one voted for Republicans to allow foreign-owned pesticide conglomerates to dominate the policies that impact the safety of the food every American eats. But this bill leaves no doubt that's exactly who is calling all the shots."
Food & Water Watch (FWW) managing director of policy and litigation Mitch Jones also sounded the alarm about industry-friendly poison pills, arguing that any draft containing the "Cancer Gag Act" that would shield pesticide companies from liability or the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act—which would block state and local policies designed to protect animal welfare, farm workers, and food safety—"must be dead on arrival."
Sara Amundson, president of Humane World Action Fund—formerly called Humane Society Legislative Fund—also made a case against targeting state restrictions for animals like Proposition 12 in California, which the US Supreme Court let stand in 2023, in response to a challenge by the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation.
"Once again, the House Agriculture Committee Republican majority is bending to the will of a backwards-facing segment of the pork industry by trying to force through a measure to override the preferences of voters in more than a dozen states, upend the decisions of courts all the way up to the Supreme Court, and trample states' rights all at the same time," Amundson said Friday.
The National Family Farm Coalition highlighted that "instead of addressing the widespread concerns of family-scale farmers—ensuring fair prices for farmers, improving credit access, addressing corporate land consolidation, and creating a trade environment that benefits producers—this draft perpetuates the status quo that enriches and empowers corporate agribusiness. The result is an accelerating farm crisis that continues to hollow out rural communities across the US."
Thompson also faced outrage over other policies left out of the GOP legislation—particularly from those calling for the restoration of $187 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump forced through last year with their so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (HR 1).
"HR 1 shifts unprecedented costs to already cash-strapped states, expands time limits, and strips food benefits away from caregivers, veterans, older workers, people experiencing homelessness, and humanitarian-based noncitizens," noted Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center.
"HR 1 is an unforgiving assault on America's hungry, deliberately dismantling our nation's first line of defense against hunger," she continued. "Yet, when given the opportunity to correct this harm in the latest Farm Bill proposal, Chairman Thompson unveiled a package that will only deepen hunger instead of fixing it. Hunger is not something Congress can afford to ignore."
Jones of FWW said that "families and farmers are hungry for federal policy that supports small- and mid-sized producers and keeps food affordable. Instead, Chairman Thompson appears poised to check off industry's cruel wish list."
"America needs a fair Farm Bill," he emphasized. "It is imperative that this Farm Bill repeal all Trump SNAP cuts and restore full funding to this critical nutrition program; stop the proliferation of factory farms; and support the transition to sustainable, affordable food."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Industry Cronies' at Trump's EPA Reapprove Dangerous Pesticide Dicamba
"It’s hard to see how Making America Healthy Again was anything but another broken campaign promise," said one critic.
Feb 06, 2026
The US Environmental Protection Agency on Friday announced its anticipated reapproval of dicamba for two key crops, a move which, given the pesticide's proven health risks, places the EPA at apparent odds with President Donald Trump's vow to "Make America Healthy Again."
“The industry cronies at the EPA just approved a pesticide that drifts away from application sites for miles and poisons everything it touches,” Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in response to Friday's announcement.
“With the EPA taking aggressive pro-pesticide industry actions like this, it’s hard to see how Making America Healthy Again was anything but another broken campaign promise," Donley added. "When push comes to shove, this administration is willing to bend over backward to appease the pesticide industry, regardless of the consequences to public health or the environment.”
The EPA said in a statement that the agency "established the strongest protections in agency history for over-the-top (OTT) dicamba application on dicamba-tolerant cotton and soybean crops," and that "this decision responds directly to the strong advocacy of America's cotton and soybean farmers."
While scientific studies have linked exposure to high levels of dicamba to increased risk of cancer and hypothyroidism and the European Union has classified dicamba as a category II suspected endocrine disruptor, the EPA said Friday that "when applied according to the new label instructions," it "found no unreasonable risk to human health and the environment from OTT dicamba use."
This is the third time the EPA has approved dicamba for OTT use. On both prior occasions, federal courts blocked the approvals, citing underestimation of the risk of chemical drift that could harm neighboring farms.
The agency highlighted new restrictions on dicamba use it said will reduce risk of drift.
"EPA recognizes that previous drift issues created legitimate concerns, and designed these new label restrictions to directly address them, including cutting the amount of dicamba that can be used annually in half, doubling required safety agents, requiring conservation practices to protect endangered species, and restricting applications during high temperatures when exposure and volatility risks increase," it said.
Critics noted that the EPA during the Biden administration published a report revealing that during Trump’s first term, senior administration officials intentionally excluded scientific evidence of dicamba-related hazards, including the risk of widespread drift damage, prior to a previous reapproval.
Others pointed to the recent appointment of former American Soybean Associate lobbyist and dicamba advocate Kyle Kunkler as the EPA's pesticides chief.
"Kunkler works under two former lobbyists for the American Chemistry Council, Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva, who are now overseen by a fourth industry lobbyist, Doug Troutman, who was recently confirmed to lead the chemicals office following endorsement by the chemical council," the Center for Food Safety (CFS) noted Friday.
The Trump EPA has also come under fire for promoting the alleged safety of atrazine, a herbicide that the World Health Organization says probably causes cancer, and for pushing the US Supreme Court to shield Bayer, which makes the likely carcinogenic weedkiller Roundup, from thousands of lawsuits.
CFS science director Bill Freese said that “the Trump administration’s hostility to farmers and rural America knows no bounds."
“Dicamba drift damage threatens farmers’ livelihoods and tears apart rural communities," Freese added. "And these are farmers and communities already reeling from Trump’s [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids on farmworkers, the trade war shutdown of soybean exports to China, and Trump’s bailout of Argentina, whose farmers are selling soybeans to the Chinese—soybeans China used to buy from American growers.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular