New director prepares for move back to Midwest

Mark Rasmussen overlooks Olmsted Island at Great Falls of the Potomac River in Maryland. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., was an American landscape architect best known for wildlife conservation efforts and lifetime commitment to national parks.

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Listen to the seminar, read about his background

By LAURA MILLER, Newsletter editor

Although he is not scheduled to begin work until June 1, Director-elect Mark Rasmussen has been learning all that he can about sustainable agriculture in Iowa and activities at the Leopold Center.

He was a guest at the center’s advisory board meeting on March 1, and plans to attend the April 3 Iowa Local Food Summit organized by Leopold Center staff. He also has joined monthly staff meetings by telephone as he works to wrap up his responsibilities as a supervisory microbiologist at the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine in Laurel, Maryland.

“I’m the first to admit that I have a large learning curve and my goal is to listen a lot this first year,” Rasmussen told advisory board members after they had shared their ideas of the most critical issues facing the Leopold Center in the future. He said he intends to visit each of the 17 members on their ‘home turf’ to further explore comments and issues raised during the meeting.

In some ways, his move back to Iowa may seem like he’s coming home. Rasmussen grew up in northeast Nebraska and worked 18 years as a scientist and research leader at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Animal Disease Center in Ames.

During a public seminar in December that was part of the director search process, Rasmussen described his family’s farm near Hubbard, Nebraska just west of Sioux City. “This farming experience and growing up as a farm kid have molded me in more ways than what I was probably willing to admit when I was younger,” he said.

His family farmed 900 acres (about half maintained as pastures), fed about 1,000 cattle, and grew corn, soybeans, alfalfa and oats. The farm also included “bottomland” in the Missouri River valley as well as rolling terrain and steep slopes with sharply-cut gullies susceptible to erosion due to the fine Loess soils.

“Frankly, some of it was a pain to farm,” he said. “But with proper methods – waterways, terraces, a proper crop mixture – it was possible to farm this land and do a pretty good job.”

As production in the beef industry consolidated in the late 1970s, Rasmussen said his family had greater difficulty sourcing feeder cattle. Rasmussen decided to enter graduate school and his father retired from farming. He shared aerial photos of the area showing how land use has changed over the past 20 years with fewer terraces and farming along land contours.

“What you see are two very different approaches to agriculture here in this one little section of land,” he said. “One [landowner] has found it’s still possible to farm with terraces and so forth and the other has decided not to. This shows the dual-edge effects of our technology of moving to larger equipment that doesn’t lend itself to certain practices. The result can be soil erosion, nutrient loss and loss of habitat and wildlife diversity.”

Rasmussen concluded that conservation needs to be a conscious effort, rather than a by-product of state and federal policies designed to manage other issues in production agriculture.

Armed with a Ph.D. in dairy science from the University of Illinois, Rasmussen went to Kingsport, Tennessee to work at a Kodak research farm developing nutritional products for cattle. When the facility closed three years later, he joined the NADC in Ames specializing in rumen microbiology.

Rasmussen further developed his expertise in food safety as a member of the USDA team that studied disease-causing bacteria linked to several outbreaks of foodborne illness and deaths. The research led to two patents, including fluorescent ‘blue light’ technology to detect bacterial contamination on fresh meat.

At the FDA, where he has worked since 2009, Rasmussen manages a team of 25 scientists that tests and classifies microorganisms on meat products and animal feed. The group also provides technical guidance and research support for FDA regulatory decisions on drugs, feed additives and contaminants in animal feed.

At the public seminar in December, Rasmussen described his management style as being “participatory, transparent and consensus-seeking” and said that he seeks collaboration and advice before making important decisions. When asked about his views on soil erosion, and whether fertilizers should be used to accommodate for losses, he again pointed to one of his biggest concerns with today’s agriculture.

“Having moved around the country, I know of places where they would kill to have a good foot of soil under them,” he said. “We are blessed with a very abundant resource. But this is another part of our American culture, that when we have abundance we tend to squander it or overuse it until at some point we have to wake up and take better care of it.”