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More about Fred Kirschenmann
On July 1, 2000, Fred Kirschenmann assumed
duties as director of the Leopold Center.
Background and education
He is president of Kirschenmann Family
Farms, a 3,500-acre certified organic farm in Windsor, North
Dakota, where he also was president (1990-1999) of Farm
Verified Organic, a private organic certification agency.
He is a leader of the organic/sustainable
agriculture movement, and has served on many boards and
advisory committees of such organizations. He has completed
a five-year term on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's
National Organic Standards Board, and has chaired the
administrative council for the USDA's North Central Region's
Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE)
program. He recently completed work for the North Dakota
Commission on the Future of Agriculture, and was a charter
member of the Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture
Society in 1979.
He has been a member of the board of
directors for the Henry A. Wallace Institute for Alternative
Agriculture since 1994, and was president in 1997.
He earned degrees from Yankton College in
South Dakota, Hartford Theological Seminary in Connecticut,
and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago, where he
earned numerous awards including a Rockefeller Fellowship.
He was the first chair of the Department of Religion at
Yankton College, and was Dean of the College at Curry
College in Boston. He has authored or co-authored numerous
articles and book chapters dealing with ethics and
agriculture.
About his farm operation
Kirschenmann is a third-generation farmer.
His German grandfather farmed the Volga River area in Russia
and immigrated to Lincoln, Nebraska, in the late 1800s. His
family has been farming at the current location since 1930.
Although his operation is slightly larger
than the average 1,500-acre North Dakota farm, Kirschenmann
tends fields at several locations, as do his neighbors,
within a 22-mile area in Stutsman County in the south
central part of the state. About 1,000 acres are native
prairie, used for grazing livestock, and the rest is managed
in a diversified operation. Kirschenmann raises eight to
nine crops each year in three different rotations. This year
he planted durum and hard red spring wheat, rye, buckwheat,
millet, flax, canola, also alfalfa and sweet clover for
forage and green manure crops. They have 113 brood cows, and
raise calves until they're yearlings so they may have 200
animals on the farm at any given time.
A part-time appointment July 1, going to
full-time by November, will allow him time to harvest this
year's crop and transition management of the farm. He said
he already has identified two people who will take over
day-to-day operation of the farm.
Comments about
the Leopold Center
"This is an opportunity to think about where we want to go with
agriculture in the future, and for many farmers, we don't
have a lot of time left. The principles of sustainability
must become actualized in a way that will really work for
farms and farm families. There are no easy answers."
"[Former Center director Dennis Keeney]
always used the metaphor of a journey toward sustainable
agriculture practices. I see myself as becoming part of that
journey."
"The Center has a strong background in
science and I want to build on that, but also recognize the
challenges ahead of us. I am very grateful for the excellent
leadership that Dennis provided for the Center during its
first ten years, and look forward to building on that
foundation."
Comments
about sustainable agriculture
"One of my passionate interests is making
things work on the land. Just to give you an example, we
talk about exports as being the answer to the farm crisis,
but that has never worked on the land and farmers recognize
this. It doesn't mean that exports are not important, but
they're not, by themselves, the solution."
"My academic background in philosophical
studies has trained me to always ask the questions behind
the questions. This discipline has been very useful to me on
the farm, too, and my involvement in national organic
agriculture organizations. We make assumptions about things
but we don't look at what those assumptions are based on. I
will question assumptions and make sure that the fundamental
ideas that we may be trying to adopt and operate by are
sound and valid. I don't think we do enough of that in
sustainable agriculture."
"I hope that my experience of 25 years will
bring to the Leopold Center this kind of reality check."
Comments about Aldo Leopold
"Leopold has been a hero of mine for a long
time. His notion that we really need to solve our problems
ecologically is at the heart of his thinking and I couldn't
agree more."
"Leopold's thinking is so relevant to where
we are today. We're still living very much in an
industrialized society, although we're moving into the
information age and then to a biological age, which will
change our entire way of thinking. We need to think about
how the emergence of the biological era affects agriculture.
I think the current application of genetic engineering is
still a machine application. Instead of using our knowledge
of biology and how our systems work, we are applying one
solution to a very specific problem, which upsets something
else in that system. How can we better manage the dynamics
of agriculture to keep everything in balance?"
Thoughts from his writing
• From an essay, "On Becoming Lovers of the
Soil," in the 1997 book, "For All Generations: Making World
Agriculture More Sustainable" (Patrick Madden, editor) [for
entire essay, go to the Institute for Global Communications
http://www.igc.org/wsaala/lovers.html]
Now I realize that an invitation to
become lovers of the soil is an alien request. It is not
something that one can take to one's national government
or the United Nations as part of the sustainable
agriculture debate. It is not something that you can put
on the agenda of national environmental organizations.
It is not an issue that food activists can take to their
members. It will not appeal to university researchers.
It isn't even an invitation that one can readily take to
organic farmers . . . But I would submit that it is
absolutely fundamental to all the work that all of us
are doing. Soil is the connection to ourselves. . . To
be at home with the soil is truly the only way to be at
home with ourselves, and therefore the only way we can
be at peace with the environment and all of the earth
species that are part of it. It is, literally, the
common ground on which we all stand.
• From an essay, "Expanding the Vision of
Sustainable Agriculture," in the 1997 book, "For All
Generations: Making World Agriculture More Sustainable"
(Patrick Madden, editor
If we
redesign agriculture to make us more aware of the "most
basic details of our own food production," then
agriculture might help us become more aware of our
dependence on local ecosystems and thereby motivate us
to restore and maintain them…. [and] evolve a new
production ethic that would combine the need to produce
with the need to sustain the means of production. Such
an ethic would likely modify the goals of agriculture
and end our tendency to reduce agriculture to a
production system driven solely by economic forces.
• From an essay, "A Transcendent Vision," in
the 1991 book, "Caretakers of Creation" (Patrick Slattery,
editor; Augsburg Press, Minneapolis)
I appreciated the personal space
provided during my years growing up on the farm. I
always enjoyed the solitude of getting on a tractor and
being close to the earth. The richness of the soil,
especially when worked in the spring, had a profound
influence on me. My dad's near obsession to prevent our
land from blowing away was ingrained into me as a child.
As I grew older, he passed on to me his sense of wonder
for the miracle of the soil's productivity, as well as a
profound sense of responsibility to care for it.
• From a position paper on the global
economy, "Feeding the Village First," issued by the Northern
Plains Sustainable Agriculture Society [http://www.npsas.org/],
January 1999.
Feeding the village first is a
concept which suggests that local community economies
are healthiest when they are as self-reliant as
possible, especially where food and agriculture are
concerned. Self-reliant communities are healthiest
because they are free to pursue their own course, shaped
by cultural norms which evolved in those communities to
maintain the local public good…
More important for agriculture is our
failure to recognize that farms are not factories and
that the effort to impose these principles on farms has
created an agriculture that is headed for collapse.
These principles create huge monocultures that have
numerous adverse effects. They make farmers vulnerable
to the economic fortunes of a very narrow band of
commodities. Farmers who have specialized in the
production of hogs or wheat, for example, are currently
being forced out of business due to the record low
prices of these commodities. Farmers who have
diversified farms, on the other hand, have also
diversified their risks.
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