Popular prof blazes trails in sustainable agriculture

By Laura Miller
Newsletter editor

John Pesek (center) talks with agronomy graduate students (from left) Terry Loecke, Adam Davis, John Kost and Alison Carpenter.

When Iowa State University agronomy graduate students first talked last spring about having a campus discussion on sustainable agriculture, their natural choice was to involve retired distinguished professor John Pesek. Naming what they hope will become an annual on and off-campus event after him seemed logical.

Their biggest hurdle was convincing Pesek. He could think of many others "more deserving" of the recognition for their contributions to sustainable agriculture.

Graduate student Adam Davis thinks not.

Davis remembers reading Alternative Agriculture, a book published in 1989 by a National Research Council committee chaired by Pesek, then agronomy department head at ISU. Now considered a landmark study, the report documented how farming systems that used fewer pesticides, fertilizers, antibiotics and fuel could be productive and profitable. It also was controversial.

"I was an undergraduate in biology at Yale, thinking that my contribution to agriculture would be creating GMOs," Davis recalls. "But the more I learned, the more I realized I might be creating problems with technological fixes. This book showed me there might be another way."

Davis didn't know about Pesek's role in the book until he came to ISU a decade later to pursue a graduate degree. Pesek's office was next door.

"When I found out he had chaired the editorial committee for the report I wasn't surprised," Davis says. "He considers issues carefully and doesn't go with the easy answers. He was at the center of a mainstream institution (ISU), coming out with ideas that really questioned commonly-held approaches in agriculture. It is his integrity, vision and moral courage that makes him such an exciting influence for me."

Davis and others who planned the John Pesek Colloquium on Sustainable Agriculture March 1-2 in Ames and Decorah want to do more than honor a beloved professor and unique individual. They want to encourage a wide-ranging discussion of sustainable agriculture and the risk-taking approach that Pesek brought to his career.

Leopold Center director Fred Kirschenmann read the Alternative Agriculture report in 1989, then heard Pesek speak three years later to a group of North Dakota farmers.

"I don't know if they were ready to hear what he had to say," Kirschenmann recalls. "To many farmers at the time, technology was the silver bullet that would help them out. I think Pesek realized that science can sometimes bring you to wrong conclusions so he used 14 case studies to show that other things can work on farms. The report legitimized what a small group of farmers had been trying to do."

Lorna Michael Butler, the Henry A. Wallace Endowed Chair for Sustainable Agriculture at ISU and the colloquium's major sponsor with the Leopold Center, said she appreciates Pesek's perspectives. His speech, "From a Trail to a Path to Sustainable Agriculture," considers how agriculture has triumphed and failed, calling sustainability the "central issue for the human race."

One of his students and now an agronomy faculty member, Mary Wiedenhoeft, agrees that sustainability is important, but coming to that conclusion often involves a personal journey.

"I was educated at ISU in the late 1970s when big was best," she said. "When I went to graduate school in the Pacific Northwest, I would get letters from home saying, ‘Well, today we still own the farm.' I began to wonder what's going on economically and in our lives that would cause a pretty good farmer, my father, to be nervous about ownership of the land and the future.

"We believed in conventional agriculture but we soon learned that in order for us to continue we couldn't go down the same path," she added. "All of us have gone through that, and Dr. Pesek has helped many people get started on this transition."

Pesek minimizes his role.

"There's a time for everything. When the time comes for something to happen, the person who's put on the firing line will probably execute it well," he explained to a group of graduate students gathered outside his office. He said it was "a stroke of luck" that brought him to ISU in 1950, and then to head the agronomy department in 1964, a position he held until 1990.

His research has been nationally recognized for contributions in soils, fertilizer, crop fertilization and the economics of fertilizer use. He has served terms as president of both the American Society of Agronomy and the Soil Science Society of America.

Yet, people who've never heard of sustainable agriculture understand Pesek's very simple definition: "Sustainability is doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons."

The 1989 book, Alternative Agriculture, by the Committee on the Role of Alternative Farming Methods in Modern Production of the National Research Council, is available from the National Academy Press.

The following quotes come from Pesek's March 1 lecture. The text also can be found at the Leopold Center's web site and in a commemorative brochure available from the Henry A. Wallace Endowed Chair for Sustainable Agriculture, (515) 294-6061.

"Farming represents a unique relationship of food and fiber producers to the rest of society. Farmers, by producing all the food and fiber needed, freed society to pursue other activities of civilization. In return for use of its sovereign territory, society has high expectations of the farming community."

"We have ignored the real cost of our applied technology at the farm level because we have not had to pay for the consequences, and society at large has not fully determined nor assessed this cost, nor has been willing to pay more for alternatives. After all, the upland farmer does not directly pay for the cost of dredging the Mississippi River or reimburse the loss of Gulf of Mexico fisheries, nor does the farmer in north central Iowa have to worry about nitrate removal from river water used for drinking in Des Moines."