Like all Sibande’s work, Sower in the Field explores the intersection of of race, gender, and labor in South Africa.

In her corner of the Chazen Museum of Art’s Mead Witter Lobby, Mary Sibande’s Sower in the Field is in constant conversation with light. The sculpture — a figure based on a body cast of the artist — wears a cascading dress and cradles an apron of seeds. At eye-level, the contours of the clothing catch the daylight from the wall of windows along East Campus Mall. When viewed from above, shadows spill from her skirt’s hem and ebb and flow with the movement of the sun throughout the day. At night, passersby can admire the work’s quiet, commanding presence backlit against the museum’s lobby.

The bronze piece is a rare departure from Sibande’s usual mixed-media approach but still bears hallmarks of her work, which interrogates intersections of race, gender, and labor in South Africa. The sculpture was cast for the Chazen at a foundry in South Africa and traveled by cargo ship, train, and truck to reach Madison. After its long journey, its message is right at home on the UW campus.

Sower in the Field is the latest acquisition under the Sara Guyer and Scott Straus Contemporary African Art Initiative.

“For a land-grant university, we thought this was a really interesting dialogue: a woman who’s planting something, birth and rebirth, agriculture,” says Katherine Alcauskas, chief curator at the Chazen. “We have a lot of works by John Steuart Curry and other regionalists, and we have a lot of similar images of farmers in fields, so we thought this would be a counterpart [to inspire] students to think about planting, about regionalism, and about the role of crops in the Midwest and in Africa.”

Sower is the latest acquisition under the Sara Guyer and Scott Straus Contemporary African Art Initiative (CAAI), made possible by the Straus Family Foundation. The curatorial endeavor was funded thanks to former UW professors Sara Guyer and Scott Straus to celebrate the diversity of contemporary African art at a campus with a long history in African studies.

“Sara and I found incredible beauty, excitement, energy, and creativity in contemporary African art,” Straus says. “Part of the impetus was wanting to bring it to a larger audience in the United States and to support African artists.”

After an exhibition of CAAI works in fall 2023, the show will likely travel, sending Sower on another, albeit shorter, journey.

The sculpture is in constant conversation with light.

But of course the $4 billion is not in a single pile, either in coins or bills. Some is in the university’s endowment, where it’s invested to provide support in perpetuity. About a fourth of the sum is promised but not yet delivered — some pledged and some as part of “planned gifts”: included in wills, bequests, or estates. But also, a lot of that money has already been spent: it’s supporting scholarships, research projects, buildings and facilities, and faculty positions right now.

The effects of the All Ways Forward campaign touch nearly every part of university life, and so they’re a little harder to picture than a billion baskets of socks and T-shirts. But follow the career of a current UW student, and you’ll see those effects just about everywhere.

FRESHMAN YEAR: 2018–19

Eryne Jenkins x’22 hails from Magnolia, Delaware, just south of Dover. She wasn’t looking toward Wisconsin as her top choice for college, or even as her second or third choice. Her first choice was Spelman, a historically Black college in Atlanta. “I was so excited to go there because I was looking for that community, that support really,” she says. “And I applied and got into their honors program, but it was going to be full price.”

She then applied and was accepted into Dartmouth, Cornell, and Syracuse, and she found much the same story. It was her father and his love of sports that made Jenkins think of the UW. “My dad was watching Big Ten Network,² and they had done some commercial on research, and he was like, ‘What about Wisconsin?’ ” Jenkins applied, though she had never been to the Midwest and wasn’t sure that the UW could offer the sort of community she was looking for. Not only did she get in, however, she was also offered a Chancellor’s Scholarship.³ Her father told her to look on that as a lottery ticket:⁴ “You just won, and if you don’t take it, then you just threw it in the trash,” he told her. So she enrolled. It wasn’t Spelman. The UW couldn’t offer the same kind of community that a historically Black institution would. But it could offer something different, and the price was hard to pass up. Interested in eventually attending medical school, Jenkins decided to major in biochemistry⁵ in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS).⁶ She signed up for CALS’s QuickStart⁷ summer program for incoming freshmen, to connect with her classmates and get an early jump on courses. Within that program, she met student mentors who helped her get direction for her academic career — not just advice on classes, but also connections with organizations such as AHANA-MAPS, the African, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American⁸ Minority Association of Pre-Medical Students. QuickStart also gave her tours of campus buildings⁹ and an introduction to UW traditions, such as Babcock Dairy¹⁰ ice cream — she soon discovered her favorite flavor is Badger Blast. SOPHOMORE YEAR: 2019 –20

Convinced that QuickStart had given a vital beginning to her UW career, Jenkins volunteered to be a student instructor¹¹ as a sophomore, helping with the Connect to Campus program — guiding freshmen in their transition to university life.

“I remember a student who didn’t understand financial aid,” she says. “We sat down and made an appointment with the financial aid adviser,¹² because it’s so important to know what you don’t know. [Because of] QuickStart, I understood that even if you don’t know the answer, someone else might, and they are here to help you.”

Jenkins got involved with the Wisconsin International Scholars Program, and she studied abroad¹³ in Denmark. She explored her academic options, changing her major from biochemistry to microbiology,¹⁴ and eventually switching to biology.¹⁵ Just before her senior year, she landed on a double major in biology and environmental studies.¹⁶ Her spring semester was interrupted by the arrival of COVID-19, which shut down in-person instruction in March 2020 and would have a major impact on her next semester.

JUNIOR YEAR: 2020 –21

Jenkins’s time working with freshmen in QuickStart inspired her to take on another job that is deeply involved with helping new students: house fellow¹⁷ at Sellery Hall.¹⁸ “We were friends more than just colleagues,” she says of the house fellows and staff. “That has been a big part of my community.” But the role of house fellow in fall 2020 was far from easy: campus experienced a September surge in COVID-19 cases,¹⁹ and Sellery ended up quarantined.

“It was a lot of time spent indoors,” she says.

Still, COVID-19 didn’t entirely define her experience. With encouragement from her former QuickStart adviser, she landed a position in the research lab of obstetrics and gynecology professor Aleksandar Stanic-Kostic, where she studied reproductive immunology:²⁰ “preeclampsia,” she says, “which is hypertension while you are in gestation; preterm birth; and things like that.”

Jenkins also received an On Wisconsin Society scholarship²¹ from the UW’s Homecoming committee, and she became more deeply involved with a sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, one of the Divine Nine²² historically Black Greek-letter organizations. By the end of the year, she’d become the chapter’s president. She joined a religious group, Impact, and took on a summer internship with Madison’s Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness, run by fellow Badger Lisa Peyton-Caire ’96, MS’99. By the end of her junior year, she was deeply involved in Madison life, both on and off campus.

SENIOR YEAR: 2021–22

In her final year, Jenkins is trying to take life a little easier. She moved into an apartment off campus, and she has a lighter course load. Sort of.

In her first three years, she says, she would pack her schedule with classes, aiming to get as much done as she could. But this year, she wants a little bit of time to smell the roses, or perhaps the begonias in front of Humanities.²³

“I’m just trying not to be as stressed,” she says. “If I have a question after class, I want to be able to go ask it. If I want a break from study time, I just want to do that. My schedule now is a lot more spread out so that I can just break up my time a little bit and take a leisurely walk somewhere if I want.”

This doesn’t mean her schedule is easy: it includes Environmental Studies 460²⁴ and Biochemistry 510²⁵ and Zoology 360²⁶ and a senior thesis with Stanic-Kostic, and she’s toying with the idea of ObGyn 710, a graduate-level class, as her ambition now is not just medical school but to get into an MD/PhD program. “I would like to do medical education,”²⁷ she says. Jenkins is hoping that a more open schedule will give her time to appreciate the community she’s built in Madison over the previous three years: time for sorority meetings, which may take place in Memorial Union’s²⁸ new National Pan-Hellenic Council Room; time to grab a bite at Union South whenever she wants. “I do love Union food,” she says.

And she isn’t entirely giving in to relaxation. “I signed up for a gym membership this past week,” she says. “I don’t know why.”

But there’s one more development for Jenkins in her senior year, and it promises connection with the most important part of her community: with the assistance of a Chancellor’s Scholarship,²⁹ Jenkins’s sister, Sydne x’25, became a Badger and will study engineering.³⁰ And for this new community member, Jenkins is ready to give support as fully — and fiercely — as she received it.

“There’s no Y on the end of Sydne’s name,” Jenkins warns. “Don’t put one there. She’ll be mad.” •

The new building will support Wisconsin’s meat and poultry processing industries, which have total annual sales of $8.6 billion. Michael P. King

The Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences celebrated the completion of its new Meat Science and Animal Biologics Discovery facility with a virtual event in November. The new building, which replaces a lab built in 1931, will support Wisconsin’s meat and poultry processing industries, which employ some 16,250 workers and have total annual sales of $8.6 billion.

The meat science program shows how much animal science has developed from its early days teaching the best ways to farm and process meat. It involves research, teaching, and outreach in the areas of meat science, food safety, and animal biologics — value-added molecules from animal tissues that function as medicines or therapeutics.

The 67,540-square-foot building houses a meat and poultry processing facility, as well as a separate Biosafety Level 2 processing and lab facility for food safety research. The building also boasts a new Bucky’s Varsity Meats retail store (formerly Bucky’s Butchery), which sells UW-produced cuts to the public.

The building’s main atrium is named in honor of Mark Cook, a professor of animal sciences who passed away in 2017 and who spearheaded the animal biologics component of the meat science program.

You can catch the virtual celebration, complete with photos of the facility, profiles of faculty and staff, messages from alumni, faculty, and friends, and a special meat-related playlist.

“Cheeseburger in Paradise,” anyone?

Now, to help move others in this direction, Paris serves as a speaker with UW–Madison’s Wisconsin School for Beginning Dairy and Livestock Farmers, which teaches pasturing to newcomers. It’s a chance for Paris to lend a hand to the next generation at a time when a lot of dairy farmers are asking themselves tough questions. Should they go organic or add cheesemaking? Grow their herd? Sell the farm?

Their decisions will affect all of us, in terms of what we eat, how much we pay for it, and how agriculture will transform the planet we live on. Consumers’ tastes are changing. Global markets are in flux. The industry has been buffeted by years of low milk prices, and the country faces daily farm closures. What will American dairy look like in 30 years?

Amid a serious identity crisis, UW–Madison ingenuity might point the way forward.

The Next Big Thing

The United States has lost almost half its dairy farms since 2003, shedding 3,300 in 2018 alone. During that time, the average herd size has doubled to 250 cows. And the average cow now produces a record 23,000 pounds of milk a year. There are fewer dairy farms in the country, but they’re bigger and producing more milk than ever.

All that milk keeps prices low — a problem for covering costs.

“The problem with the dairy industry is that it’s a classic uncoordinated supply chain,” says Mark Stephenson, the director of the UW Center for Dairy Profitability. “We have 40,000 independent decision-makers in this country. And they’re all making decisions about how much milk to produce every day.”

When prices spiked in 2014, farmers reacted by investing in more production. The country became saturated with milk just as other problems arose. In response to tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, key export markets, including Canada, Mexico, China, and Europe, levied retaliatory tariffs on American dairy. Prices crashed. Although they started to rise at the end of 2019, the coronavirus pandemic plunged the dairy industry, like the rest of the world, into uncertainty just a few months later.

Wisconsin, which lost 10 percent of its dairy farms in 2019, serves as an example of how to deal with this emergency. In June 2018, the state and the UW System assembled the Wisconsin Dairy Task Force 2.0 to investigate the industry’s long-term challenges.

One of its top recommendations was instituting a Dairy Innovation Hub to drive the research necessary for keeping Wisconsin dairy vibrant.

The hub launched last year across the UW System’s three agricultural campuses: Madison, Platteville, and River Falls. The state legislature awarded it $8.8 million to start. Those funds are slated for new, permanent research positions dedicated to four priorities: stewarding land and water resources, enriching human health and nutrition, ensuring animal health and welfare, and growing farm business and communities.

The goal is to recruit scores of fresh minds focused on developing new products, improving efficiency, and discovering how dairy farmers can prepare for the next downturn. “You’re not going to find the next big thing if you don’t have someone looking for it,” says Stephenson.

What We Don’t Know

Those forthcoming discoveries have dairy farmer Shelly Mayer ’88 confident about the future.

“Research plays a huge part in keeping our industry in a forward tilt toward progress,” she says. “Often people are scared about what they don’t know. When it comes to research, I’m excited about what we don’t know.”

Mayer is executive director of the Professional Dairy Producers of Wisconsin —a trade group that provides education for dairy farmers nationwide —as well as a member of the Dairy Innovation Hub’s advisory council. She also milks 60 cows on 250 acres with her husband, Dwight ’85, outside Milwaukee.

Like Bert Paris, Mayer is proud of having bucked conventional wisdom. When she and Dwight were graduating from UW–Madi-son during the 1980s farm crisis, their friends told them to stay away from agriculture. “A lot of kids were trying to get away from the farm,” says Mayer. “And we were trying really, really hard to get rooted on the farm again.”

That doesn’t mean it’s been easy. Like many dairy farmers, Mayer has worked off-farm to earn additional income and secure health insurance. During her career, she’s seen huge changes in the nation’s dairy industry. Consumers have moved away from milk and to-ward cheese. Feeding and caring for cows have grown increasingly sophisticated.

Perhaps the most consequential change is the increase in average herd size. Part of that growth is due to new technology that allows dairies to mirror the industrialization of crop farming. Most large farms were once small farms that reinvested in growing their herds, and they’re still family owned.

Bigger farms, with lower costs per gallon of milk, have also weathered the price slump. During good times, they tend to have larger profit margins than smaller farms. And they hire more workers, which adds rural jobs and helps farmers plan breaks from nonstop work.

But larger dairies do face a big challenge: a lot of manure and few places to put it. The average dairy cow produces 17 gallons of manure and urine a day. That manure is valuable fertilizer for nearby farms. But the opportunities for responsible manure spreading are narrow and growing narrower thanks to changing weather patterns, heavier rains, and strict spreading regulations. In addition, there is less farmland available to spread manure than there used to be due to cities and towns expanding into rural areas. When excess nutrients from manure or fertilizer get into streams or rivers, they promote noxious algae, choking off waterways and making fishing and swimming unpleasant or even dangerous. Groundwater is at risk, too.

Paris’s method of grazing recycles manure year-round, reducing runoff. Jeff Miller

Almost half of Americans get their drinking water from groundwater, and 43 million rely on private wells. The U.S. Geological Survey has found that about one in seven wells exceeds federal standards for nitrate, a contaminant from commercial fertilizer, manure, and leaking septic tanks. Excessive nitrate is linked to health problems in adults and can be fatal in infants.

That’s another reason for innovation. One of the Dairy Innovation Hub’s four focus areas is improving water quality. Recent research from the $10 million Dairy Coordinated Agricultural Project led by UW–Madison scientists also investigated manure management as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

They found that injecting manure into the soil reduces nutrient runoff from fields. The project also recommended technology upgrades like digesters to turn manure from a liability into an energy-generating asset.

“Farmers on farms of all sizes are very mindful of our water quality, because we drink water from our own land,” says Mayer. “That’s why we’ve got to research, be creative, and come up with a whole menu of different options for manure management. Our community is very diverse, so one option is not going to work for everyone.”

In addition to academic research, Mayer has faith in the ability of individual farmers to reinvent themselves. She says the younger generation is more comfortable navigating the high-tech world of today’s dairy and better prepared to take advantage of reams of data on nutrition and efficiency. And there are as many problem-solvers as there are dairy farmers around the country.

“America’s dairy sector is world renowned because of our diversity in dairy farmers. Big, small, and everything in between is needed to keep American dairy strong,” says Mayer. “Often our most challenging times drive innovation.”

Too Much Cheese

One of the biggest challenges for the innovators is Americans’ cheese consumption, which has risen 25 percent since 2000. A lot of that increase is driven by demand for mozzarella-topped pizza. And fueling all that cheese are millions of acres of cropland and dairy farms, whose manure runoff threatens our waterways.

A potential fix harks back to Bert Paris and his Belleville farm: grazing. It’s a modern-day innovation based on an age-old technique.

The five-year Grassland 2.0 project, which launched in 2019 with a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, wants to help farmers in the Upper Midwest convert to pasturing their livestock to boost profits and improve sustainability. Nurturing diverse grasslands can provide many environmental benefits. “We want to build soil, hold on to nutrients, keep our water clean, and reduce flooding,” says Randy Jackson, a UW agronomist and head of Grassland 2.0.

Paris, a partner in the project, uses the management-intensive rotational grazing system common among graziers today. Each morning, he leads his herd from their pasture into the milking parlor. While they’re resting after being milked, he moves his electric fencing system to open up a fresh section of pasture. “Moving the wire takes me about five minutes,” says Paris. “It’s pretty simple.”

His 80 cows have 12 hours to eat through one acre of pasture before they’re moved. Across 135 acres, Paris has enough land to give the grass about a month to regrow before the cows come back again. The strict rotations recycle manure year-round on the farm where it’s produced, reducing runoff. And by using perennial grasslands instead of annual row crops as feed, Paris and other graziers use less artificial fertilizer, which can also harm waterways.

Grazing dairies typically produce less milk per cow than conventional operations that provide corn, soy, and silage to more confined animals. But the operating costs of grazing also tend to be lower because farmers need to buy less feed or use less equipment and fuel to grow their own feed.

The upshot is that grazing can beat least as profitable as conventional dairying — sometimes twice as profitable, says Jackson. Many graziers take advantage of value-added labels like “organic” or “grass-fed,” which command higher prices.

But only a minority of American farmers graze their livestock, so Grassland 2.0 is building communities of practice among would-be graziers. Partnering with the University of Minnesota and nonprofit organizations, Jackson and his team are organizing “learning hubs” for regional farmers.

The project is also researching the financial barriers to grazing. “Bankers for a long time have been pretty skeptical toward any agri-culture that wasn’t conventional farming,” especially systems that reduced production, says Eric Booth ’04, PhD’11, a UW–Madison hydroecologist and a member of Grassland 2.0.

Not everyone is going to end up grazing their herds. Cows can only walk so far, which typically limits herd sizes, a deal breaker for some farmers. And grazing still carries a stigma as being old-fashioned.

But if Jackson and his team are successful, they could help farmers rediscover the advantages of the old system. Although grazing has been limited in recent decades, UW research is helping shine a light on the costs and benefits of this system to help more farmers consider adopting 21st-century grazing rooted in new knowledge. And that offers all of us a chance for cleaner water, less flooding, more stable climate, and improved biodiversity.

Dwight and Shelly Mayer (center) have faith in farmers’ ability to reinvent themselves. Courtesy of Shelly Mayer

The Future of American Dairy

On her Milwaukee dairy farm, Mayer is proud of working with her family to care for her animals and put food on other people’s plates. Her farm’s innovation was to incorporate agricultural tourism. The family restored a barn on their property and now host weddings and other events.

It brings in extra income and lets the Mayers show how farming works as the number of farmers in the country continues to decline.

Innovations being developed today at UW–Madison will help define the future of American dairy: what products are available, how the land and animals are cared for, and how farmers make a living. Farmers like Mayer are eager to take those ideas and run with them.

“I don’t think we’ve begun to realize our potential,” she says.

Jeff Miller

Since 1951, Hancock has been the chief UW experimental facility for potatoes. Researchers have looked at more than 1,000 varieties to see how they fare in Wisconsin. The Badger state is the nation’s third-leading producer of potatoes.

Jeff Miller

The station also includes the Potato Grading Facility. Among their various activities, members of the research staff test potatoes for the kind of chips they’ll produce. Here, Sam Perez visually inspects a chip.

Jeff Miller

Hancock grows more than just edible plants. It also includes a five-acre display garden, established in 1993. Called the A. R. Albert and Villetta Hawley-Albert Horticultural Garden, it brings beauty to the station.

Courtesy of Tiffany Buchholz

Damon’s character is a botanist, a rare profession for Hollywood heroes. But if humanity is to achieve its most ambitious spacefaring goals — planetary bases, even interstellar travel — botanists might just see more starring roles, on-screen and off. Because plants, it turns out, are key to our ambitions.

Just as they do on Earth, plants in space can produce oxygen, recycle waste, and serve as food — a huge boon when extended trips make packing enough sustenance or relying on Earth for breathable air impossible.

For more than half a century, UW–Madison researchers have been at the forefront of developing a new agriculture for the final frontier. They’ve answered the earliest questions about how plants fare in space, built the equipment that grew the first crop in orbit, and brought us to the precipice of feasible space farms. Today, they are partnering with astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) to decipher plants’ genetic responses to weightlessness, hoping to engineer plants that can thrive as human spaceflight advances.

“I think people are just totally engaged by the unknown above them,” says Simon Gilroy, a UW professor of botany. “We’re just built to explore.”

For more than half a century, UW researchers like Ted Tibbitts have been at the forefront of developing a new agriculture for the final frontier. UW Archives S12584

Veggies in Orbit

With his chest-length gray hair, penchant for Hawaiian shirts, and British accent, Gilroy is unmistakable. Animated and gleeful, his conversation quickly leaps from the tiny, unassuming mustard plants that dot his office to the future of space travel they foretell.

Nutrition is essential for astronauts, he explains. The space environment suppresses appetite, and preserved food is unpalatable. Appetizing, fresh food may be one way to keep astronauts at a healthy weight, and the antioxidants supplied by fresh fruit and vegetables might help them combat cancer risks spiked by cosmic radiation. And there’s the psychological component: living plants serve as a reminder of home.

Yet reaping these benefits requires overcoming challenges imposed by taking plants out of the gravity in which they’ve evolved. “One way to deal with these challenges is to … build an environment that basically takes the Earth’s environment into space,” Gilroy says. “The other way is to use our knowledge of the biology of the plants to engineer the plants to deal with the loss of gravity. And as a biologist, of course, I think that’s the much more elegant way.”

For 20 years, Gilroy has worked to understand both how plants sense gravity and how they handle the consequences of its absence. Without gravity, water can stick to roots, blocking oxygen much like a flooded field would. The stressed plants still grow, but weakly.

To understand that stress, and how to overcome it, Gilroy has launched his mustard plants, known as Arabidopsis, to the ISS during four experiments. His latest experiment arrived in December 2017. Astronaut Scott Tingle unwrapped 26 petri dishes containing 10 tiny seeds each and installed them into a plant growth chamber named Veggie. The seeds germinated, and the plants grew for a month. Midway through the experiment, Tingle took images under a microscope, capturing where the plants suffered from low-oxygen stress. The following month, Gilroy received the images, along with the frozen plants. He is now using advanced gene sequencing technology to compare the activity of genes in space-grown plants to those grown on Earth. Genetic engineering may help him and fellow researchers to prepare plants that can cope with the rigors of space travel.

Patrick Masson, a UW genetics professor, launched his own plants — the grass Brachypodium — to the ISS in April 2018. Much more closely related to major crops like wheat, rice, and corn than Gilroy’s Arabidopsis, the grass can give scientists clues about how the world’s most important crops might fare in space. “It’s a very steep learning curve,” Masson says of his first spacefaring experiment. “And that’s where being at an institution like [the UW] is really helpful, because there is that long tradition of people who have experiments in the space environment.”

Zero-Gravity Spuds

Bob Morrow PhD’87 is part of the UW’s long tradition of plant spaceflight researchers. He arrived on campus as a botany and horticulture graduate student in 1982 and joined the lab of Ted Tibbitts ’50, MS’52, PhD’53, a professor of horticulture researching how to use plants for life support and designing controlled growth environments for use on the space shuttle.

While Gilroy focuses on altering the biology of plants to thrive in space, Morrow tackles the engineering. “Once we identify a stress that plants face, then we can attack it with hardware systems and plant protocols,” says Morrow, who is now a principal scientist at the Madison campus of the Sierra Nevada Corporation, an aerospace contractor for NASA. He designed the Veggie system that Gilroy and Masson used for their experiments.

In August 2015, Veggie made history when U.S. astronauts Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui toasted one another with Veggie-grown red romaine lettuce before delightedly munching on the leaves. It was the first time U.S. astronauts were given the go-ahead to eat space-grown produce. (Russian cosmonauts got the okay to eat green onions some four decades earlier.)

“That’s awesome,” Lindgren said at the time — between bites — offering a thumbs-up to his fellow astronauts.

“We understand enough now that we need to start demonstrating large-scale production of food crops in the space environment,” says Morrow. He has since worked with a team at Sierra Nevada and NASA to develop the Advanced Plant Habitat, the successor to Veggie and the space station’s current and most sophisticated growth chamber. And Sierra Nevada is now developing a much larger system with 80 square feet of growing space named Astro Garden for an eventual mission to Mars or a permanent lunar orbiter.

Veggie and its successors grew out of developments in plant spaceflight hardware that were pioneered in the Tibbitts lab in the 1980s and 1990s. Tibbitts was part of a NASA-sponsored interdisciplinary research center located in the College of Engineering, where he oversaw a team that pain- stakingly developed Astroculture, a compact plant-growth system for use on board the space shuttle.

“Ted was there at the beginning,” says Gilroy. “He’s one of the three or four people that you would say are the pioneers.”

Over several iterations, the team perfected systems for pumping nutrient solutions, providing sufficient light, controlling temperature and humidity, and managing carbon dioxide and other gases. By 1995, the researchers were ready to pursue one of their top goals — producing a crop in space.

“NASA had identified six primary life-support crops based on their nutrition and ability to be productive and that people were familiar with,” says Morrow. Those six — white and sweet potatoes, wheat, rice, soybeans, and beans — are still primary candidates for feeding crews today.

Tibbitts’s team, based in Wisconsin, the nation’s third-highest potato-producing state, chose potatoes. On Earth, miniature potatoes can form out of the buds of excised leaves in just a few days, so the researchers decided to test if these tiny tubers could grow in orbit. The UW team secured five leaves into Astroculture, and the space shuttle was launched in October 1995.

The results were obvious as soon as the growth chamber was opened nearly 16 days later: tiny tubers, just a couple of centimeters across, had formed on every leaf. Closer inspection showed only minor differences between the space-grown potatoes and their earthbound counterparts that served as controls. Those spuds were proof that a crop could be grown in zero gravity.

The Astroculture team continues this work today. While Morrow began working on Veggie at Sierra Nevada, postdoctoral researcher Ray Wheeler became the lead of advanced life-support systems at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where he partners with Gilroy and Masson on their experiments. And Morrow’s fellow graduate student Dan Barta MS’84, PhD’89 now manages life-support research at the Johnson Space Center.

When Tibbitts watched The Martian, he found the potato subplot suspiciously familiar.

“They never gave us any credit!” he says, laughing.

A New Age of Discovery

Tibbitts didn’t originally set out to grow potatoes in space. He was a lettuce man — on terra firma.

“I grew up on a [dairy] farm in Wisconsin,” says Tibbitts, now an emeritus professor. “The farm was rented out — I only milked the cows once or twice in my life. But I did work around the farm in the summertime for money — driving tractors, baling hay.”

Those experiences helped push the young Tibbitts toward the College of Agriculture when he arrived on the UW campus in 1946. He earned his undergraduate degree in agronomy, continuing on for advanced degrees in horticulture. After a stint in the army, he was hired by the university to research tobacco before being transferred to study the cause of tipburn, a condition that makes head lettuce unmarketable.

But funding from the lettuce industry was scarce. It was the Apollo era, and NASA was considering growing lettuce on the moon, so Tibbitts turned to the space agency in hopes of securing money for his research. While searching for NASA connections, Tibbitts met Sam Johnson, a space biologist at the North American Aviation Company, an aerospace contractor based in Los Angeles. The two began planning an experiment to test how zero gravity alters plant growth.

By 1967, a number of organisms had been sent on brief spaceflights, primarily to test the effects of cosmic radiation on life. Few experiments were exploring how organisms behave when gravity is ripped away. To get at these behavioral changes, Tibbitts and Johnson turned to pepper plants. As these are compact plants with broad leaves, several could fit into a tight space. The plants’ leaves normally stretch out perpendicular to gravity, and the team planned to use a camera to track the leaves’ position in zero gravity.

That September, the UW researchers strapped nine Yolo Wonder bell pepper plants into a 957-pound biological laboratory named Biosatellite II, which carried 13 experiments in all. The lab was launched on a Delta rocket from Cape Kennedy, Florida. For 45 hours, the plants orbited Earth. When a tropical storm approaching Hawaii threatened the planned recovery, the laboratory was instructed to reenter Earth’s atmosphere early. An Air Force plane captured the capsule as it parachuted over the Pacific Ocean and flew it to Hawaii.

There, Tibbitts waited. As with the tiny potatoes three decades later, the results were obvious as soon as the capsule was opened. The plants’ leaves, outstretched at launch, had drooped during orbit, offering one of the first insights into how plants respond to weightlessness. The same year, the university opened the Biotron, a state-of-the-art, controlled-growth facility. Designed to provide climates ranging from below zero to 100-plus degrees Fahrenheit, the Biotron allowed scientists to strip away variability and tinker with different growing conditions.

Tibbitts quickly moved in, becoming the first plant scientist in the new facility. Working in the Biotron, he established himself as an expert in the precise control of plant-growth conditions, vital experience for his space-shuttle work. He was named director of the Biotron in 1987 while working on Astroculture.

That work also helped Tibbitts figure out how much space is needed for self-sufficient missions. He helped establish for NASA that 20 square meters of garden space are needed to keep a person alive. “This would provide them all the oxygen they need. It’ll provide all the water they need. And it’ll provide all of the energy needs, but not a balanced diet.” That size is several times larger than even Sierra Nevada’s ambitious Astro Garden system in development, but Tibbitts and Gilroy are confident that in the near future — for space programs, this might mean decades — longer-term bases will be established, first in geostationary orbit, then on the moon or Mars. In many ways, Gilroy says, despite the enormous distance and other challenges, Mars provides an opportunity for the most Earth-like plant-growing systems. That’s in large part because Martian gardeners could rely on having about one-third of Earth’s gravity — possibly enough to keep plants growing normally.

Gilroy likens space travel today to the age of discovery on Earth, with explorers staring at horizons, unsure of what lies beyond, but eager to sail forward.

“We’re at the point of people jumping into boats,” he says, “and just going.”

Their UW experience opened James (left) and Robert Baerwolf to new ideas. Andy Manis

Though Sassy Cow Creamery is certainly one of a kind, in scale it resembles another legendary facility 20 miles south on the UW campus.

“We’re probably like a cousin of Babcock ice cream,” James Baerwolf ’93 says, “or at least they were a size we could wrap our heads around when we were getting started.”

As College of Agricultural and Life Sciences students, James and his brother, Rob ’96, (at left in photo above), studied agriculture education and dairy science. They commuted daily from Columbus, Wisconsin, for classes, while also working on the family farm.

“I figured I’d be farming and wanted to take advantage of everything the university had to offer for all aspects of operating a farm,” Rob says of a course load that also included plant science and engineering.

When James and Rob graduated, their parents were ready to retire, giving the brothers a chance to make the farm their own. “The college experience allowed us to be a little more willing to adopt new technology or changes in farming,” James says.

Today, the brothers work the same Columbia County land their grandfather purchased in 1946, though their footprint has expanded. Their two farms cover 1,700 acres. Some 850 cows produce 6,000 gallons of milk daily, including 250 cows that produce organic milk.

In 2008, James and Rob, looking for new ways to grow their business, opened Sassy Cow Creamery. They produce and sell organic and traditional milk, 50 ice cream flavors, and other dairy products at retailers across Wisconsin and Illinois and at their Columbus location, a year-round destination for dairy lovers. Last summer, new construction tripled the size of the store.

Back when they began building the creamery, the two looked to their alma mater for tips. Working with the former Dairy Business Innovation Center, UW’s Center for Dairy Research, and some Babcock plant personnel, the Baerwolfs tapped into decades of expertise. They draw on the UW’s resources for staffing, too. Many of the creamery’s interns are Badgers. Sales and marketing manager Kara Kasten-Olson ’07 started at Sassy Cow after graduating with degrees in dairy science and life sciences communication.

As the dairy industry continues to evolve at a rapid pace, Rob’s advice for future farmers mirrors the model that grew the Baerwolf farms and Sassy Cow. “New ideas and innovation are a better bet than trying to succeed in the commodity markets or by size alone,” he says.

Kaanates/iStock

Wisconsin could someday have a reputation for producing nuts as well as cheeseheads, thanks to an effort to introduce a new cash crop to the northern part of the state.

That crop is hazelnuts — the crucial ingredient in Nutella spread and other decadent treats. The American hazelnut, which grows wild in northern Wisconsin, is more winter-hardy than the traditional European hazelnut. Jason Fischbach, an agricultural agent with UW Extension, says that the university helped found and has worked with the Upper Midwest Hazelnut Development Initiative (UMHDI) to cross the wild nut with European hazelnuts and has identified several promising hybrids for commercial production.

Hazelnuts are “a high-value specialty crop,” says Fischbach. “We don’t have many options in our region, and this is one of them. The crop of the future,” he adds, “has got to generate money as well as being good for the environment,” and hazelnut trees fit the bill. They provide good ground cover that helps prevent erosion and flooding, as well as providing habitat for wildlife.

Fischbach says that introducing hazelnuts as an established crop brings potential for value-added industries producing nut oils, gluten-free flour, nut butters, baked goods, and even hazelnut-flavored beer. “Now is an exciting time [for UMHDI]. When consumers try hazelnuts, they want to buy them.”

Bethany Goodrich

Nic Mink ’02, PhD’10 is mad as halibut, and he’s not going to take it anymore. Mink likes fish. But he very much prefers his fish to be good fish. The world has too much bad-tasting seafood, he argues, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

“Seafood is a $20 billion industry,” he says, “and yet out of every 10 pieces of fish you buy at the grocery store, how many are bad? How many are just okay? Maybe 5 out of every 10? Why do we put up with this?”

To address this deficiency, Mink founded Sitka Salmon Shares, a community-supported fishery (CSF) that delivers seafood straight from the Alaskan boats to subscribers around the country.

Though he describes himself as a fishmonger, Mink didn’t study mongery at the UW, nor did he study aquaculture or economics. He earned his bachelor’s and doctorate in history — in particular, environmental history — and in his academic life, he teaches part time at Knox College in Illinois. But between grad school and teaching, he moved to Sitka, Alaska, to live out the Wisconsin Idea.

“I wanted to take my intellectual endeavors out to do good,” he says. “That really resonated with me. I wanted to see environmental studies in real life. The humanist in me wanted to learn about food and food systems and food justice.”

One of the things he learned was that fisheries tend to commoditize their products: that fishermen usually sell to just a few large corporations that value quantity over quality. Mink wanted to bring a different model — one that valued quality, connected fishermen to consumers more directly, and ultimately gave diners a better meal. He wanted, in other words, to bring to seafood the same ethos that underlies community-supported agriculture (CSA).

In a CSA, consumers buy shares in a local farm, which then supplies food directly to them. After returning to the Midwest, Mink founded Sitka Salmon Shares, which, similarly, sells memberships to consumers around the nation. Fishers in Sitka, who have an ownership stake in the business, deliver high-quality fish — not just salmon, but also cod, crab, halibut, and more. The company flash-freezes the fish and ships it to subscribers.

“It’s an artisanal product,” Mink says, and, at typically $18 or $20 per pound, the price reflects it. “But it’s worth it. We have fish that are substantially different than what you’d find even at a Whole Foods. We see this as an everyday luxury item.”

Michael P. King

On hot days, the cows at Rosy-Lane Holsteins in Watertown, Wisconsin, are given cool showers while they’re being milked. It’s a strategy for promoting cow comfort that Jennifer Van Os (above) has learned by visiting milk producers around the state since joining the Department of Dairy Science as an assistant professor last spring. “It’s very nice to work with a farm where the things we’re looking at were their idea,” she says. “It’s not some zany idea that we came up with in the university and now we’re trying to get people to adopt it.”