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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/.
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'A Big F*ck You to Big Tech': New Jersey Residents Defeat AI Data Center
"It's time to build communities, not data centers," said one local activist.
Feb 19, 2026
The New Brunswick, New Jersey City Council voted Wednesday to cancel plans to construct an artificial intelligence data center and instead build a new public park where the 27,000-square foot facility would have gone.
Artificial intelligence data centers—which house the servers and other infrastructure needed to train and power AI models—have major environmental and climate impacts, as they consume massive amounts of electricity and water, as well as rare earth metals and other resources.
According to New Brunswick Patch, hundreds of people packed into Wednesday evening's city hall meeting to voice concerns that the proposed data center would send their electricity and water bills skyrocketing, and that the facility would harm the environment.
"Many people did not want this in their neighborhood," New Brunswick NAACP president Bruce Morgan said during the council meeting. "We don't want these kinds of centers that's going to take resources from the community."
The site of the nixed data center, 100 Jersey Avenue, is already slated for development including 600 new apartments—10% of which will be affordable housing units—and warehouses for startups and other small businesses. Now, thanks to Wednesday's vote, a park is on the agenda too.
"This is great news, no data center," New Brunswick resident Anne Norris told Patch.
"My kids went through the public school system; we didn't pay for lunch because we have so many families under the poverty line," Norris said before taking aim at what she said was the dearth of affordable housing approved for the site.
"Given the economic status of the people who live in New Brunswick, I don't think 10% is really sufficient," she contended.
Following the council meeting, jubilant residents celebrated the data center's cancellation, chanting slogans including, "The people united will never be defeated!"
"We say a big 'fuck you' to Big Tech!" local organizer Ben Dziobek shouted to the crowd. "We say a big 'fuck you' to private equity! And it's time to build communities, not data centers."
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This Land Is... No One's Land
Our movements must question mythologies and admit contradictions if we intend to build a new world that’s sustainable, reciprocal, and inclusive for all.
Jan 25, 2026
As a guest on the 2019 podcast “Post-doom with Michael Dowd,” terrestrial ecologist Tom Wessels agrees humanity is entering a “bottleneck,” a condition that can afflict any species that ceases to live in relationship and reciprocity. Ballooning populations get stuck trying to claim space in an un-expandable hole, and many die.
This is what’s going through my head as I idle in an impossibly long single line of traffic on the road into Mount Kisco, New York. My kids are in the back of the car, asking for snacks. It is three days since Renee Good’s murder, 10 days since the end of the deadliest month in the deadliest year for people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.
“No snacks,” I tell the kids, scanning for parking. “You should eat your meals. Then I wouldn’t have to throw away food and bring a buffet everywhere we go.”
Pedestrians pass our car with protest signs as car exhaust blows through the vents. I feel an unexpected pang of tenderness for our quiet kitchen table, its leftover bowls of cereal and uneaten peanut-butter toasts. I already know I’ll give in, as all mothers do, when they can, when their children want to eat.
This land is no one’s land. This land was not made for you and me. This land is part of us, as we are part of it.
“But we compost the food,” my 7-year-old says, “so it’s actually good for the Earth when we throw it away.”
Our eyes meet in the rearview mirror as I prepare a response, but then the car behind me beeps and I see a distant light has turned green.
We crawl past the demonstration and I honk in support. Upbeat `80s pop blares from a speaker, backdrop to the protesters’ screams, whistles, and bells. My three-year-old, already a musician, moves his head as close as his car seat will allow, trying to deconstruct the music and noises.
“Go again, mommy,” he says. But at that moment I find a miraculous spot, just down the street from the main event, open perhaps because of the one-hour limit on the meter. I claim the space anyway; lug the kids, coats, and backpack out of the car; lock the doors; fill the meter; and grab hands for the walk toward the protest.
A few steps into the journey, a woman asks if she can photograph my kids. I smile and say, "No thank you," covering their faces with my hands. Photos become a constant request over the next hour. Many people ask, but others just lift and click. My son picks up a sign in the grass and I read it to him: No Fascist USA. More phones point in our direction.
I survey the crowd and think of something Monique Cullars-Doty, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, said on the news the other day. “America has never addressed its love affair with white supremacy,” she said, connecting the ICE murder of Renee Good to the state-sanctioned violence that has assaulted Black and brown communities for centuries.
It is one thing to agree with this assessment—that white supremacy made colonialism possible, slavery imperative, resource hoarding commendable, ecological collapse acceptable, and ICE inevitable. It is quite another to admit our complicity, to connect our daily transgressions—a need for the latest gadget, an idling tailpipe, a thoughtless unkindness—to the generations of violence that made all this possible.
I squat in the wet grass and dig through the backpack, dipping my fingers deeper until I hear crinkling plastic. The kids hold out their hands expectantly and whisper, “Yes!” when their favorite granola bars emerge from the bag.
The music stops abruptly, and a woman with a kind face speaks over a microphone. She is Woody Guthrie’s granddaughter, simply by association evoking a simpler time, a sepia time, a time of acoustic guitar and faith in good intentions.
Thinking of her grandfather makes me think of mine—a Jewish Romanian immigrant’s son who stood with Black neighbors in 1950s Milwaukee when other Jewish neighbors, newly minted “white” by America’s slippery standards, wanted to prevent more Black families from moving in. My grandfather now floats above the scene, a beloved figure whose own people’s history was weaponized as justification for more land grabs and violence.
Guthrie’s granddaughter begins to sing:
This land is your land; This land is my land
And my blue-eyed son who loves music, the child I’ve always somehow felt the need to remind people is technically Jewish despite his blonde hair and last name, drops his snack, steps forward into the circle, and opens his mouth to sing along. A hundred phones rise in unison to capture the image.
I resist the urge to cover his face, crouch next to him, and try to join in. But the words catch in my throat.
My land. Your land.
As far as I can tell, not a single Indigenous Lenape person, the first peoples who walked this place now called Mt. Kisco, is present.
This land was made for you and me.
Behind the song circle is a vast cement parking lot, and before it a busy road. The bear, wild turkey, wolves, birds, and aquatic species once so abundant as to be considered eternal, are nowhere to be seen.
From California to the New York island
Places unnamable and unknowable, claimed in this song that once defined a movement, but never created a path or vision for us all.
And yet, here is my son singing, somber, understanding that what he’s participating in is important. And there is my daughter, running around behind the crowd, feeling the joy of community together, the freedom of cool air on her skin. The wrongness and the beauty of it all seem too hard to untangle, and I wonder if this is one way the bottleneck shows up—as the end of the road for a fundamental myth.
In the 2019 interview, Wessels addresses this. He speaks with curiosity about what might come next. Communities for much of human history were “…actually emotionally quite rich,” he says. “They had vibrant relationships within their clan community, they had a vibrant relationship with Mother Earth, they had stories and myths that made that linkage even stronger… so life could have been physically hard, but might have been experientially rich.”
Is there a way for us to treat our past myths with tenderness, while still recognizing where they went horribly wrong? Can we compost rather than discard them, and maintain the parts that serve? Can we teach our children new myths to carry them to a richer, more vibrant, gentle, reciprocal, and inclusive world?
This land is no one’s land. This land was not made for you and me. This land is part of us, as we are part of it.
The song ends, and worries of a parking ticket push a new world’s mythologies from my mind. I grab my son’s hand and scan for my daughter, whose silhouette I spot immediately. She’s reaching for the branches of an ancient fir tree by the road, drawn in by its shade and pungent scent, as so many have been before.
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