FOREVER • Donald L. Wyse

FOREVER

Donald L. Wyse

June 6, 1947 – July 2, 2024

When Great Trees Fall

Maya Angelou

When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety. When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.

Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves.

And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.

Roger & Don

Obituaries

Donald Leroy Wyse, 77, of Shoreview, MN died peacefully on Tuesday, July 2, 2024 with his loving wife and family at his side. Don loved his family and was a visionary for agriculture, education, and community development.

Don was born in Wauseon, Ohio, on June 6, 1947, the son of Earl and Ruth (Garner) Wyse. He grew up on the family farm and excelled in high school sports. Don credited his brother Roger Wyse for getting him to college. He earned a Bachelor of Science from The Ohio State University and a Ph.D. from Michigan State University. Don married Beverly Ann Clark on June 7, 1969. Don adored “Bevy Ann”, from their first encounter at the county fair through their 55 years of marriage, their love grew deeper with each passing year. They were two kids with free spirits, set out to change the world, against all odds. Don also had a close relationship with each of his children and grandchildren, always excited to see them, taking an active interest in what they were doing, and guiding them on their journey.

Don had many special gifts, but his greatest gift and mission was supporting and caring for people. He engaged all people he encountered, accepting them as they were, without judgment, listening to their story, then partnering with them to identify and begin a preferred path toward their future. Don used this gift in all aspects of his life: education, scientific research, organizing, community building, fighting social injustice, and interpersonal relationships. Don recently celebrated 50 years of teaching and research at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. During his tenure he instructed thousands of undergraduate students, advised over 100 graduate students, published over 200 scientific journal articles, authored two book chapters, held 14 research patents, and 6 plant variety patents. During the latest phase of his career, Don dedicated himself to the creation of a broader vision and framework of agriculture that serves rural and urban communities with a goal of economic growth and resource conservation. He was instrumental in bringing together individuals across the entire agriculture infrastructure to work on the most challenging issues affecting agriculture, the environment, and society. He successfully formed several formal partnerships and collaborations among farmers, universities, governments, foundations, major food companies, conservation groups, and rural and urban community leaders. Don was the visionary and co-founder of the Forever Green Initiative, which serves as a platform and model for developing alternative crops and cropping systems that provide longer-living cover on the landscape with additional economic and environmental benefits to rural and urban communities. Several of these crops have achieved commercial success and the Forever Green Initiative has gained global recognition and support. Despite Don’s critical role in forming and developing these ideas and collaborations,

he never wanted personal recognition; it was always about the people involved, doing the hard work to achieve success.

Beyond his professional achievements, Don’s greatest joy was his family. He was a loving husband to Bev, a devoted father to his children Dawn (Todd) Wyse-Pester and Ryan (Mary) Wyse, and a doting grandfather to Hayden Pester (Leah Marek), Lara Pester (Jake Chilson), Cameron Wyse (Megan Biggs), and Connor Wyse. To his family he was “Papa”. Typically acting goofy to make them laugh, down on the floor with grandkids, playing in sandboxes and doll houses, conducting fun science experiments, and cheering and beaming with pride as each of them accomplished their life milestones. But he also challenged each family member to reach their full potential and instilled the value of helping other people along their journey. Don and Bev also enjoyed vacationing by themselves and with family, traveling across the U.S. on new adventures and many trips to the national parks of the west including Rocky Mountain (Estes Park), Yellowstone, and Grand Teton to relax and renew their spirit. Through the years, on every trip Don would continually educate his family on various plants in the environment, what made them unique to establish and persist, and the role they played in the surrounding ecosystem. Standing in front, his arm stretched across the horizon, explaining the physical world in Don’s unique way of blending science, common sense, and humor saying “Well something sure the hell happened here”. His passion and excitement were infectious, and he thoroughly enjoyed each moment he had with family.

Don’s absence leaves a profound void in the hearts of those who knew him, but his spirit and influence endure as a light of inspiration and hope for a brighter future. Don will be remembered for his passion, intellect, sense of humor, and unwavering commitment to creating a better world through agriculture. His legacy lives on through the countless lives he touched and the principles he instilled. His favorite song was “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers, which captured his love for Bev, their adventure through life together, and his pursuit in the death of current ideas and challenging the status quo. “Me and Cinderella, we put it all together, we can drive it home with one headlight”.

Don will be lovingly remembered by his wife Bev; their two children: Dawn (Todd) Wyse-Pester of Shoreview, MN, Ryan (Mary) Wyse of Elk River, MN; four grandchildren: Hayden and Lara Pester, Cameron and Connor Wyse; his brother Roger Wyse (Jaleh Daie) of Austin, TX; his sister Marie (Paul) Sprankle of Columbus, OH; his nephews Scott, Greg and Doug Sprankle; and many extended family members and friends. He was preceded in death by his parents, Earl and Ruth Wyse.

University of Minnesota ag visionary, Forever Green Initiative founder Don Wyse dies

The University of Minnesota crop scientist helped develop Kernza and pennycress, key parts of the regenerative agriculture movement.

By Christopher Vondracek

Star Tribune July 10, 2024 JULY 9, 2024 — 3:37PM

Don Wyse, a University of Minnesota crop scientist and visionary of regenerative agriculture who spearheaded what may be the second Green Revolution associated with the state’s land-grant university, has died at 77.

Wyse died on July 2 at his home in Shoreview. He’d sustained injuries after falling, according to the university.

The death of the agronomist and longtime professor in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, whose career spanned 50 years of students and groundbreaking research into the potential staples for agricultural systems on a warming planet, set off an outpouring of reactions from across Minnesota and the agronomy community.

“His passion for sustainable agriculture was infectious, whether it was helping develop the grass-seed industry or paving the way for ‘third crop’ production in the state,” said Minnesota Department of Agriculture Commissioner Thom Petersen. “Don left a lasting imprint on agriculture and Minnesota.”

Originally a weed scientist who joined the U in 1974, Wyse co-founded the Forever Green Initiative in 2012. The team of crop scientists are developing a suite of perennial and winter-hardy crops, from Kernza to pennycress, that could by century’s end cover the Upper Midwest — feeding the world, fueling airplanes and protecting soil and water.

“Interestingly, his training was as a herbicide physiologist — a weed scientist,” said Mitch Hunter, associate director of Forever Green. “A brilliant mind, a visionary, [Wyse] saw that we need diversity back on the landscape and more and different crops that can compete with weeds and protect the soil and protect the water.”

Wyse cut a 1960s-era hippie profile ― long-haired, wearing sandals, sometimes prone to bluntness ― that occasionally left him standing out in agricultural circles known more for Carhartt and work boots. But in the 1970s, his research into weed resistance in Roseau and Lake of the Woods counties established an early victory: a booming grass-seed industry along the Canadian border.

“Whether it was someone working with private companies, [or] working

with legislators, Don would find himself at the center of it,” said Richard Magnusson, a farmer in Roseau County who remembered Wyse’s early research in the region decades ago.

The early success helped cement a formula he’d follow in the coming years: bringing parties together.

Over the ensuing decades, Wyse built a consensus across the industry, helping new crops find commercial viability and drawing onlookers from university laboratories and corporate boardrooms. In 2012, along with fellow agronomy professor Nick Jordan, he founded Forever Green, which focuses on breeding better strands of perennial and winter-hardy annual crops.

In a 2014 interview with the Star Tribune, Wyse said he wanted to stay at the U until “we have stabilized funding” for Forever Green. According to Jordan, the Legislature has provided Forever Green about $2.5 million annually in recent years.

Rep. Ginny Klevorn, DFL-Plymouth, has known Wyse since her husband served as one of Wyse’s first graduate assistants in the 1970s.

“Don was a very special person,” Klevorn said. “He wouldn’t hesitate to say what you’re saying is not factual. But he also brought people in. He created this network all across the United States.”

A central theme of Wyse’s research was not only developing crops that would be good for the Earth, but could also create markets for farmers who need a profit to survive. It was a perspective the weed-scientistturned-regenerative-agriculture-pioneer knew from growing up on a dairy farm in Ohio.

During the Vietnam War, Wyse attempted to enlist in the U.S. military, according to Dawn Wyse-Pester, Wyse’s daughter. But the recruitment officer denied his application. Instead, Wyse pursued his studies. Wyse received his doctorate from Michigan State University and took a job at Minnesota.

The Minnesota Crop Improvement Association lobbied for his position to aid struggling grass-seed farmers in northern Minnesota. His breeding program there launched the production of the perennial ryegrass industry. He told the New York Times that it was during this era that he used the phrase “evergreen crops” in a presentation ― an idea that would someday morph into Forever Green.

By planting crops year-round on the cold, often-frozen Minnesota landscape, a farmer could make more profit and keep the topsoil in place: a win-win.

“[Wyse] accomplished that by advancing global food security and environmental sustainability with his expertise in crop systems,” said Brian Buhr, dean of the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences at the U. “A true ‘drum major’ for food and environmental justice in the world.”

In recent years, as the Earth warms and environmentalists and farm groups seek to continue to produce food while drawing down greenhouse gas emissions, the contributions of the countercultural weed scientist from the University of Minnesota have been gaining attention.

Earlier this year, Cargill, the global agriculture company based in Minnetonka, announced a $2.5 million investment with Forever Green to develop new crops producing low-carbon fuels and feed.

Wyse’s legacy can also be seen through his children and grandchildren, who have largely followed him into agronomics, as well as his many students. Wyse himself followed in the footsteps of other agronomist giants associated with the U, including alumnus Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, whose authorship of new wheat varieties in the 1940s led to a dramatic boost in yields and decrease in hunger across the globe.

“Borlaug’s revolution was green for a short period of time,” Wyse’s daughter, Dawn, said. “Wyse’s revolution was green 100% of the time, and making it profitable through every month of the year.”

Hayden, Don, Bev, Lara, Dawn, and Todd

Mary Buschette & Don in Washington, June 2024

Tributes from Colleagues, Students & Friends

Mitch Hunter, Forever Green Associate Director, UMN

I will just share a story from the last time I saw Don before the hospital.

I was in my office working on a dozen different things when I realized I should run out to the field to get some pennycress biomass samples before David Marks’ whole field was harvested. Right when I got to the field I pulled up short because a black Prius was driving by. It stopped, and there was Don. His whole face smiled and he waggled his arms at me, then showed me the bags of soybeans in the back. He had just come back from Chatfield and had stopped along the way to pick up beans. He had a plan.

David and his crew were done harvesting and someone was mowing off the stubble and the weeds. I got my biomass samples just in the nick of time before the mower came by. I thought that was my stroke of luck for the day. We stood around and chatted with David and Eric Warme and then Don said, “Seth is on his way, come over here and help me think this through.”

He drove over to the corner of the field and I followed. Here was his scheme: getting soybeans planted after the pennycress harvest--RIGHT after--to get a sense of how a pennycress-soybean double crop works in St. Paul. On his drive back to campus Don had arranged the mower and roped in Seth Naeve, our Extension soybean agronomist, to help plant. We haggled over how to line up the planter. Once Seth got there, we went over to the Prius. Don popped the trunk, said, “How’s your back,” and then hoisted a 50-pound bag into my arms.

Don watched as Seth filled the planter, cleaned some weeds out of the row units, and got lined up. Seth drove across the field, we checked the depth on the beans and agreed to make it shallower on the next pass.

As he walked along, Don was kicking soil over any planting furrows that weren’t closed up. He told me, “I always do this for all of my experiments. Because you know, if you don’t get your seeds in the ground right, you don’t have an experiment.”

A light rain started to fall and I felt the un-done things on my desk start to beckon. I told Don I needed to take off and--on cue--he said, “What, so you aren’t committed?” As I walked away I turned to capture this scene of two professors out in the field planting soybeans. One visionary and one who was the umpteenth colleague Don had recruited to help him carry out that vision. And me, walking away, grateful to have had that time in the field, learning from the master and shooting the shit. Not knowing how precious those moments would be, and that I would remember them forever.

Seth L. Naeve, Extension Soybean Agronomist and Professor of Agronomy & Plant Genetics, UMN

One very brief addendum to Mitch’s recent memory...

It just occurred to me that in the very short time that Don and I spent in the field together on Thursday, at three different moments, he mentioned and provided a very short (Don) story about three of his family members. Today this is a reminder to me that although we at the U take a lot of ownership over this man who spent 60+ hour weeks x 50 years with us -- his family was always top of mind. He spoke frequently and proudly of his family in ways that I have never heard from any other coworker. But, these moments were so natural - and quintessentially, Don.

Jane Grimsbo Jewett, MISA Associate Director

So many great memories of Don. One of my favorites is from when I was an undergraduate student in his Weed Control class, having a class discussion about options other than pesticides. We were talking about competition between weeds and plants, and I asked something to the effect of what about planting something that would compete with the weeds more than the crop? Don laughed and made a dismissive hand gesture and said, “Naw, that’s a stupid idea.” Turns out he had just been turned down for a grant proposal on that very thing and was quoting a reviewer comment! Of course he found another way to do the research on that idea - he would never, ever let naysaying get the best of him.

I also loved the way he presented his slides showing satellite imagery of the Corn Belt over the course of a year, with the Big Brown Spot from October - April when many fields were bare. “What could possibly go wrong?” he would ask, with that characteristic Don Wyse letting-you-inon-the-joke grin and chuckle.

Katherine (Kata) Young, Natural Climate Solutions Manager

Dear Forever Green Team,

On behalf of my colleagues at Clean Wisconsin, we are so sad to hear this news and extend our deepest condolences to Don’s family, friends

and colleagues. Don was indisputably a visionary and inspirational leader whose touch extended well beyond the Minnesota borders. We have long admired his work to foster the Forever Green Initiative, and our own Natural Climate Solutions Initiative has been inspired and buoyed in part by his and your efforts. We look forward to continuing to work in alliance with you to advance a Forever Green bioeconomy in the Upper Midwest and to honor Don’s memory and lasting legacy.

Take good care of yourselves, and each other,

B. Pam Ismail

Professor, Director, Plant Protein Innovation Center (PPIC), Department of Food Science and Nutrition, UMN

It was March 2010, when the four of us (Don, Shri Ramaswamy, Roger Ruan, and me) went on a trip to Purdue to attend a grant organization meeting on “plant production at the environmental interface” in response to USDA AFRI large $25 Million multidisciplinary grants. The four of us were representing our college. After the meeting ended we drove to Indianapolis to catch a flight to Chicago and then from Chicago to Minneapolis. I don’t remember exactly what happened; either the flight was canceled or was delayed. Shri and Roger somehow managed to find another connecting flight and left Don and me behind. Don looked at me and said “Those bastards left us!” Sorry, but Mitch said we can use Don’s swear words. So, after we were left behind, we sat down and waited for the next flight. Don had with him (of course) his famous big black bag, full of papers and brochures. He started telling me the story of Forever Green, and how being a young teen/adult in the 60’s shaped him into the organizer of big groups who work together on a common big vision or purpose (that explained the ponytail and the sandals, I thought at the time). His vision included connecting the dots and working together along the entire value chain from production on the land to end use, that... and changing the entire landscape. And he said “but there is no one to work with in the damn food science and nutrition department”. Don used to work with a former food science faculty who left the department a long while back and he wished to establish a new collaboration with our department. I told Don that I, along with Mirko Bunzel (who was a faculty member at the time) are new and would love to establish collaboration with the breeders. And the rest was history. 14 years passed and our collaboration grew and Don’s vision was realized. Don is one of a few who inspired me. He was also the one that told me years ago: “Start a goddamn protein Center!” I am going to miss him dearly.

Rod Larkins Retired, AURI

I agree with all comments that have been posted so far. Don was a force of nature. He will never be, truly, replaced..... The best story that I have about Don involves an interaction that I had with him while I was working at the Institute on the Environment as Special Programs Director for the Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment (IREE). Don had been trying to get some IREE funding to build up the Kernza Program at the U. Don had submitted several grant proposals to IREE and had been unsuccessful in getting a project funded . Don told me that he was very frustrated and that he wasn’t leaving my office that day until we had identified a research approach/plan which would qualify for funding under the guidelines which IREE research funds could be granted. Needless to say, the justification and outline of a program was put together that afternoon and Don eventually got his funding. Get going or get out of the way!

My sincere condolences go out To Don’s family. He will be greatly missed.

Rex Bernardo, Distinguished University Teaching Professor, & Endowed Chair in Corn Breeding and Genetics Director, Plant Breeding Center, Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, UMN

A few months ago, I told Don how I marveled at his joining the UMN when Richard M. Nixon was president-Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump, Biden

... and all this while, Don was a faculty member in Agronomy and Plant Genetics, doing what he loved, changing the world in a way that meant the most to him, shunning accolades, and never losing his vim and vigor and sense of humor as he did his work with a community that had caught his vision.

Radhika Bharathi, Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Food Science and Nutrition, UMN

Don was such an enthusiastic and lively professor! My labmates and I (George Annor’s lab) volunteered with him at the State fair for the last two years, his eyes would light up with excitement any time someone asked would stop by the booth and ask a question on perennial crops :) He will be dearly missed by the FGI community, my condolences to the family.

M. David Marks, Emeritus Professor, College of Biological Sciences, UMN

I certainly am in the camp of having my life changed by a single meeting with Don.

My research has always been focused on gene function and the molecular pathways that control various aspects of plant development. Unknown to me Don had followed my research on plant hair development using Arabidopsis. Back around 2010 funding for Arabidopsis was drying up. In the fall of 2012 Don just showed up in my office. I did not even know him. He gave me his pitch about pennycress, told me he had followed my work and wanted someone like me to work on it. I asked if it was a diploid and said yes it is. Immediately he made me see that I who had never worked in the field or away from my lab bench could possibly make a bigger impact on society. He had already talked to Kevin Dorn my graduate student at the time (now USDA Ft Collin’s) and had him on board. Don provided us with some seeds from plants that he collected from a ditch near Coates MN and with his guidance I completely changed my research direction. Perhaps not always fully appreciated Don and I often set together during student seminars and we would jointly challenge students to better understand the biology behind their research. I know that one of his key goals for the future of the program was to figure out how to bring in more basic biology. I hope Don’s dream of such is achieved. It is just remarkable of the breadth of different disciplines that Don mastered and knew had to play a collective role in achieving his dreams. He was truly unique and gifted.

One of the things I got to witness with Don was his love for his family. I first got a hint when I saw him log onto his computer. As doing so he said “I love my wife Beverly”. Explaining to me that the first letters were part of his password.

Then last fall he and Bev put me up in their townhome in Shoreview. I now live in Trempealeau WI and they put me up as we were putting my pennycress crop in. Every night Don came home and he and Bev set on the couch together often he working on his computer and she on her own projects. I can remember her occasionally jokingly asking Don “Are you still working on that?” He would just smile.

Don told me she was his high school sweetheart and that they have been married over 50 years. Also of note he was a prom king and basketball star in high school. And he loved having weekend cookouts with his family and talked about buying gifts for his grandchildren. This being someone that we know on the business side. He was also a role model as a family man.

Robert Stupar, Professor Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, UMN

What great memories! Thanks for sharing, everyone. I was looking through my phone today and found this gem from the 2022 State Fair:

I told Don I wanted to have “Pea” in the background and he was happy to oblige. I should think so...it’s his fault we started working on the species! How many hours did he spend in that booth? I learned so much from watching him work with people. He even recruited a student to the APS grad program while working in that booth -- I ended up her co-advisor. What a wonderful ambassador. What a footprint. And a lasting legacy of fine people.

Brian Buhr Dean, College of

Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource

Sciences (CFANS)

Director, Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station

Professor, Applied Economics

University of Minnesota - St. Paul Campus

Thanks all for sharing your memories -- what higher recognition can you give to an agronomist than to say he’s simply out-standing in his field”? This is from a guided private tour of all the Forever Green crop plots in 2022.

Don’s commitment and passion to developing new crops and to the Land Grant mission is simply unrivaled, ambassador, champion, drum major....words and phrases not quite capturing the full measure of Don’s contributions, but always to people first.

I still recall within the first month, if not the first week in my role, he came to my office and said...”Well young man, have you heard about Forever Green?” ... and gave me a can of Patagonia Long Root Ale and a 20 page powerpoint slide deck. I don’t know where the slide deck is but the can of Long Root Ale is on my office shelf - it may be time to open it in ‘salut’, but I’m not sure how well Kernza beer ages -- but Don would, he knew everything!

Thank you Don, for your visionary service to CFANS, the University of Minnesota and all those you’ve inspired with your boundless inquisitiveness, enthusiasm and energy.

Dr. Neil Anderson,

Interim Head & Professor, Department of Horticultural Science, UMN

Here’s the most recent picture of Don and I at Commencement 2024 (along with Mary Rogers and Jim Luby)! He was there to congratulate his granddaughter as she walked across the stage.

Joy all around -- as it always was when Don was present!

to learn how to protest.”

He obviously accomplished so much in his field and impacted so many students, but on top of it was an interesting and kind human. Sending love to his family and friends.

Whitney Place

State Executive Director, Minnesota State Office, USDA – Farm Service Agency

As many have noted, Don’s weed science class was not only a course about weeds, but about life. I was often frustrated with something going on in the world, and he would say, “In the 60’s we knew how to write on some cardboard, put it on a stick, and walk around campus. You kids need

Matt

Clark, Associate Professor, Department of Horticultural Science, UMN

In Spring semester 2023, Don and I taught at the same time every Tuesday and Thursday. Early in the semester I found him in the Borlaug lounge area about 15 minutes before class. He told me he had a spy in my class (his granddaughter) who would be reporting back on the course and my teaching. Each week after that, I’d go to the lounge and we’d swap stories about projects we were working on, struggles with funding (he’s way more creative in this area than me!), and teaching. Don made an impact on me in each of these conversations saying, “keep doing the stuff that

Mary Rogers, Neil Anderson, Don Wyse, and Jim Luby

is important [agriculture, food, farming]”. Don was my unofficial peer mentor that semester and I appreciated him taking the time to BS and share his thoughts and strategies with me.

Jacob M. Jungers, PhD, Associate Professor, Dept. of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, UMN

I really love reading these stories, thank you all for sending them!

I also love this photo of Don from a field tour in 2018 (one of ~700 he hosts each summer?). Here Don is sharing the stage with Misen Luu, the grad student to his right, and Katherine Frels, a postdoc on his left. This look on Don’s face as he holds the mic for Katherine is classic. The look of “you know your shit, now tell the story”!

Don was such an important mentor to me and countless others over the decades. Like many graduate students in his huge sphere of work, he constantly pushed me beyond my comfort zone professionally and personally, and although I didn’t realize it at the time, his relentless pressure expedited my growth immensely. Don significantly influenced the way I do science, collaborate, strategize, support community, mentor and teach.

Reading these stories and reflecting on my time with Don has brought many smiles among the tears. Some of my favorite memories include walking past Borlaug 409 at 5:30 pm and stopping to say hi to Don as he sat alone with his laptop. Many of these stops resulted in hours long conversations, and many were about how to prepare the next generation to overcome humanity’s grand challenges. Don’s passion for education was intense and truly infectious. I’m excited to continue working with you all to help realize Don’s vision of a sustainable and just society.

amazingly been able to get the first round of funding.

Hanging out with Don was always comfortable and certain to be fun. I was with him on several trips, including to China and Rome. Going through my old photos, I see that a huge fraction of them contain Don for some reason. He was always willing to do whatever goofy thing I suggested. As you can see below, when I suggested that he pose as a Roman goddess, he was happy to oblige. When Fengyi Hu asked us to try smoking according to the local custom, he was first in line. When the dancing girls invited the old foreign men to come up on stage with them, Don was up there in the middle with a big grin. I never found a way to embarrass him! And when a colleague had too much to drink before the trip back to the hotel and the rest of us were walking off, Don put his arm around him and supported him all the way back to his room. That was Don--always ready to share a laugh and equally ready to help his friends.

It’s great to be a part of what Don dreamed of and breathed life into. I’m sure you all at UMN will carry on and do him proud!

Those photos are treasures, Lee! Like it or not, you have your own UMN legend narrative based on the number of Lee DeHaan stories Don had in his repertoire.

Like so many of you, Don had a big influence on my life and career, just by being himself.

Lee DeHaan, The Land Institute

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for sharing all these memories.

I could tell so many stories about Don! Like many of you, I spent countless hours in his office talking strategy over the years. When I was in town we would go out for dinner and one time stayed from about 6 pm to closing time at The Good Earth. That evening, we decided it was time to bring intermediate wheatgrass research to Minnesota. He rounded up a group of graduate students to help me plant the first plants on campus, which I had hauled up from the field in Kansas. By the next year we had

Stories About Don

The following stories came from the Forever Green listserv discussion group int he days after Don died.

His commitment to growing the next crop of co-conspirators in agriculture was as contagious as his enthusiasm for the crops themselves. When he was featured in the NYT in 2022, I remember being impressed by how he used that huge media opportunity to not only to introduce the basic Forever Green concepts to a wide audience, but also to champion the need to organize people. It always seemed to me that even though he loved so much about his work, he may have loved working with students the most. I can think of many “high-level-strategy-type” meetings where Don would prioritize getting to class over whatever the meeting topic of the day was, always putting teaching first (and... maybe it was a convenient excuse for him to sneak out the back?).

We all know Don as a big thinker who stuck firm to his lifelong vision. He was a big ideas guy (gross understatement) but also paid attention to the small stuff (exquisite attention to the specifications of the astro turf carpeting in the state fair exhibit comes to mind...). One of my favorite parts of Don was that he knew the value of differing perspectives. Don and I didn’t always agree, and we both saw that as healthy. Many times he made space for me to sit down in his office and share my opinion, even and especially when it contradicted his. Yes, he was tireless in his forwardthinking passion for his vision for agriculture, but he also wasn’t afraid to reflect, rethink and change his mind. He cared.

I’m attaching one of my favorite photos of Don for the obvious reason of the warmth visible between Don and his good friend Carmen. I couldn’t agree more with Don’s groundedness and farmer-first mentality. The photo also represents Don’s unrivaled vest collection.

To Don’s family: I’ve loved hearing repeatedly this week about how work colleagues so often heard Don talk about his family and vice versa. Don was a relationship builder and took so much time to just chat, listen and dispense fatherly encouragement to folks in the hallway. Thanks for so generously sharing your family member with the people in his work life.

I don’t have a speck of an idea regarding Don’s thoughts on death, but I can’t shake a comforting mental image of him waving with his classic smile and twinkle in his eye as he RVs into whatever unknown next realm to cause good trouble there.

Aaron Reeser, Associate Director, Green Lands, Blue Waters

Reading and hearing everyone’s stories has been amazing, thank you all for sharing. Yesterday I talked to no less than five people that told me a single meeting with Don changed the course of their education, career, and life. Maybe more than anyone else I have ever known, Don showed me what one person can really do with a life.

There are of course many moments to choose from worth sharing and I can’t keep it to just one, so sorry/not sorry here are a few-

One blazing hot early summer weekend day, I happened to be driving past campus running errands. From Cleveland and Larpenteur, across many research fields, I could see a single person out there that was unmistakably Don. I veered off course to say hi. When I got there I found Don methodically weeding pennycress by hand, cursing and laughing about pennycress all the way. Apparently there was a tour in the morning and the plots needed to be looking sharp. Before I could get a word in he said, “What are you waiting for? Grab a hoe, young man.”

Another day I was flustered over the mountain of work waiting for me and was stressing about having to drive far away to drop off a bag of seed to a grower. He stopped and reminded me, “You know, in all these years, taking that bag of seed to a farmer might just be the most important work I ever did.”

Whenever navigating a difficult situation or laying out the current state of R&D and its commercial potential to a new partner, he’d wag his finger in my face and remind me, no matter what, “Don’t lie.” I once repeated this back to him as, “Always tell the truth,” and he stopped me and with a wry smile and glimmer in his eye he said, “I said, don’t lie.” He also often told me that my job as a manager first and foremost was to, “Protect your people.”

My time working with Don was shorter than many of you, but it has been so unique and special to work with him closely for the last five years on moving the R&D progress of Forever Green out to farmers, industry, communities, and society. On various stretches, I’d call him almost daily to talk something through. He’d always pick up, or call back shortly. Always. This work really accelerated in the last two years, especially around the winter oilseeds. Since Spring of 2022, Don and I and others hosted or met with just about every major seed, input, processing, food, and fuel you can think of wanting to learn more. As you all know, Don had the amazing ability to share essentially the same story and vision 1,000 times, but 1,000 different ways, to 1,000 different audiences.

And alongside making these pitches to every big player under the sun, he always joked that he was probably the “#1 customer” of our partners like the American Hazelnut Company and Perennial Pantry, evangelizing and handing out their products wherever he’d go.

Here is a picture of Don with a lone pennycress and camelina plant at John Deere HQ about two years ago. After the meeting, we toured the John Deere museum that had one version of every tractor John Deere ever made. Being in a museum on the history of 20th-century agricultural innovation with Don as we pitched a few of perhaps the 21st-century’s next big agricultural innovations was a rather “meta” experience. If I recall correctly, he was eager to find tractors that reminded him of his origins as an Ohio farm kid. I snapped this picture of him with a banner above that reads, “Committed to those linked to the land.” Fitting.

Colin Cureton, Director of Adoption and Scaling, UMN Forever Green Initiative, UMN

in the way forward, there we so many rich conversations that I’ll always treasure and keep learning from.

Another gift in my relationship with Don was also born out of difficulty, the pandemic forced me to stop by his house to pick up and test recording equipment so that the field days could go on. From that I got to see his dedication to outreach and education in another light, and to meet his wife and hear about his family, it was very special to get to see that side of him and was a moment of hope in dark times.

And this tragedy too is helping me value my community again in a different way, I’m so excited to see the paths we all create together in the coming time.

I’m sharing a photo from our last presentation from that project at General Mills, January 2020. With Don are professors, FGI staff, a graduate student and postdocs. A tiny image of the organizing and community Don helped to create. By chance this week I’m also submitting one of the last manuscripts from that early GMI funded work, which seems fitting.

Hi everyone,

As many of you have voiced, my memories of Don include how much he has changed the trajectory of my career and helped me see the power of organizing and building community.

My work with Forever Green started with Don yelling at me, a brand new assistant professor, in the hallways, “we want the same thing!!”, as I was trying hard to develop research projects in agriculture and climate change. I finally met with him and he pushed me and challenged me and also invited me into the work. After that he got me in touch with Craig Sheaffer and Jake Jungers, which started it all. The first research funding I was involved in was a grant from the General Mills Foundation and I was leading the carbon budget aspects of the work. The data did not come out as we’d hoped and I remember Don asking me in front of everyone, as we practiced our presentations for a meeting at GMI headquarters, if it had been a failed study. I was mortified, embarrassed, and made things so much worse for myself professionally by falling to my habit of nervously laughing and telling jokes (if I seem to be telling too many bad jokes, I’m probably super nervous or terrified!). I forced Craig and Jake to help me practice my talks ahead of time after that!!

From those first encounters though, I delved much more deeply into my science and my ownership of what are difficult concepts to articulate at times. Over the years this pushing by Don led to amazing, long discussions with him in his office about “telling the damned truth” and how to know what these agricultural systems really tell us, how to pass on our mission to the next generation. We had conversations about family, science, religion, the future of FGI after his retirement and best strategies

Jess Gutknecht, Associate Professor, Dept of Soil, Water and Climate, UMN

These stories expand our understanding of and appreciation for Don and the many relationships he created. I’m so grateful to be a part of this network. One quick story is of walking the fields with Don as he would bend down occasionally and pull a weed and gripe about how grad students don’t get out to do that enough. As we passed the perennial flax, flowering gloriously, he told the story of how, while camping with his grandson, he’d see it growing wild near a stream where the boy was floating boats in the currant. He took it back to the U and began research. Curious, open, gregarious, kind, he delighted in work and celebrated the successes of those he connected with and supported. This is a huge loss. Take care.

Beth Dooley, Beth Dooley’s Kitchen

Everyone,

My fun memories of Don:

1) Always being addressed as ‘young man’ (even after 29 years in the Department).

2) He once asked where I had bought a dress shirt I was wearing - I would argue that Don was always the second best-dressed male faculty member (sorry - it’s hard to beat Robert Jones) even if he sometimes wore socks with his sandals.

3) An ever-present, unparalleled grin/smile, and sparkle in his eyes.

I will miss him dearly.

Jochum Wiersma, Small Grains Specialist, UMN

Don was a force of nature.

Don appeared at the Clean Water Council many times to update us on progress for Forever Green. I’ve been called a decent salesman during my career, but that’s nothing compared to Don! I work with a lot of really smart people doing really good things for water quality, but Don was the best at getting right to the point by showing us the problem (the brown patch) and the solution that gives us hope for the future. He laid it out plain as day.

He asked us regularly to take a field tour, which we did many times. In 2020, COVID hit and the state prohibited any in person meetings or events for a time. So Don and I talked and I think I made the tongue-incheek suggestion that we could do a virtual tour. “Let’s do it!” exclaimed Don. He is also a neighbor living maybe 200 yards from me as the crow flies. So we did an experiment where he walked the neighborhood to see how well the video on his phone held up while connected to our Webex platform. It worked fine, and he pulled the tour off. For THREE HOURS online with the Council, he introduced researchers on his iPhone and passed it to them to explain their research while standing out in the fields in St. Paul. Then after each station like some sportscaster he’d turn it over to someone in the “studio” at CFANS to sum up what we just heard while he walked or drove to the next field. Then he’d hand over the phone again to the next person. There must have been ten stations. And all Council members were riveted to the screen the whole time. Wow. We have more confidence in doing this kind of thing now but at the time we felt like Thomas Edison inventing the light bulb.

I was out in my front yard one day and he drove by. We have a big cascading raingarden and he would check it out once in a while. He told me that he was trying to convince his HOA to install something similar to reduce stormwater runoff. We were hoping to get his neighbors to see what was possible. Then we got to talking about all sorts of current events and what impact that will have on the work. No offense to his fellow academics, but we usually think of people in his kind of position as the dismissive ivory tower dweller who didn’t need to bother with people with a masters degree. Instead, he always made

you feel like the most important person in the room. If he couldn’t other convince people that the work was important and worth investing in, then the work won’t get done.

We stand on the shoulders of giants like Don, and his impact will be felt for generations to come.

Paul Gardner, Clean Water Council

It has been amazing reading the many stories about Don. Here is mine:

I would periodically show up at the Friday FGI reseach meetings, to be present and hear about the various FGI research projects. (I joked to folks that if the presenter(s) did not have me lost by the 4th slide, it wasn’t very technical. What a talented and deep bench the UMN-FGI has that this was the case).

Don would make sure the people in the room knew each other; for me sometimes I would know the name, but may not have met them in person. Don would say “Do you 2 know each other?” After we did introductions, Don would often say something like: “Jeff is the one who reads your (FGI research) report; and he yells at me if you don’t get in in on time.” For the record, I don’t think I ever yelled at Don, but an example of how Don brought people together and how he was able to ‘motivate’ people in different ways.

I was able to attend the last Friday FGI research meeting this year, and as was sometimes the case, Don had time to sit down and talk after the meeting. We of course talked about various FGI updates, but also talked about past and current farming, since Don (OH) and I (WI) both grew up farm kids; and we would find points of humor about this. (Ex. Don to me: “I’m surprised you didn’t know that being a WI farm guy!” Me: I didn’t know that; but I do know who released the 1st alfalfa variety (answer: U-WI variety Vernal)). –Ok, may only Don, I and a few others find rivalry humor funny…

We also talked about life in general. It happened to be the week (?) of his birthday and anniversary and he talked about both fondly. I think he even used the word “saint” when describing his wife Beverly for putting up with him all these years. My condolences to Beverly and the rest of Don’s family. Thanks for allowing me to ‘put up’ with the Don the relatively short time I knew him. I will miss those ‘after meeting meetings’, and will cherish the memories of those we had.

Jeff Berg, Water Policy Specialist, MN Department of Agriculture

Don’s office door prominently featured unique and colorful signage with encouraging words of acceptance and openness, things like, “Love”, and “Peace.” Everyone was welcome in his office, and it sounds like many of us sat in those maroon chairs surrounded by piles of papers, various samples, and promotional materials, for hours on end and listened to his life advice. For me early on it was always, “You need to build more confidence. Tougher skin!” Difficult advice to hear at the time, but important and true nonetheless.

In 2013, I was a recent graduate with a B.A. degree attempting to get into applied graduate programs in agriculture across the country. Someone suggested I contact Don. He responded to me, and I met with him in Borlaug 409. He went through the slides --- the brown spot, the landscape map, and so on. I was hooked. I still have the voicemail he left me when he called to offer me the position. His willingness to take a chance on me started me on a trajectory that led to a career in ag research that would not have been possible otherwise.

Don led the APS seminar for several years during my time as a graduate student. We all learned very well how to “tell the damn story.” It’s something I think about and use on a near constant basis in my career. Don also made sure we all attended. On Monday afternoons Don would walk around the halls, knocking on students’ office doors, personally visiting their desks, waving his hands and demanding they attend seminar. He would entertain NO excuse for lack of attendance. Don certainly knew the importance of community in life and in science and worked very hard to make sure we all resisted our tendencies to isolate ourselves.

I had the opportunity to visit Roseau with Don several times over the years. One night at Gene’s, I heard Don order a “heavy cab” from the bartender. No shame on that place (I loved Gene’s) but the bartender didn’t know what “cab” or “heavy” meant with regards to wine. I think he ended up with a glass of “red,” which was not too bad of an outcome. Don knew what he wanted and was not afraid to ask, but also knew when compromises needed to be made.

At a Kernza conference once I was talking with Don and a woman scientist who was early career and under-represented. She was telling us the story of her upbringing and how she got into agricultural research. Don broke out into tears. He was genuinely so happy and proud for her success.

Don knew what those signs on his office door meant for people. Admittedly, I didn’t notice them for years, nor did I understand the importance of them. However, after returning to campus after a few years of getting tougher skin, I realized. Don fostered a safe space and a tremendous sense of community. He told me the difficult truth sometimes, but he never, ever doubted my capabilities.

Kayla Altendorf, USDA Agricultural Research Service

Thanks, Jake, for finding that picture! It is one of my favorites, and I always enjoyed doing those “dog and pony” shows with Don (despite what I may have complained to him about while setting them up). And I can still crank out a two-pager to advertise a new crop or variety in an afternoon thanks to Don and his short notice requests (commands?!). Don shared so much with me over the years, and I have taken his advocacy for others to heart. I learned not to give up when told “no” but to find another avenue to make things better.

I think Aaron is right. Don is out there on his next RV adventure blazing new trails. One of my favorite memories is spending a couple hours in his office planning my first visit to Yellowstone! He was absolutely right about what I should see and what I should have skipped there. Or maybe my favorite memory is working the State Fair booth with him and getting to meet his family. It was clear to me that no matter all of his achievements, he was most proud of his family and what they contributed to the world!

Katherine

Frels, University of Nebraska – Lincoln

The last time I chatted with Don was last week. I was borrowing (stealing) an amp + microphone that Don bought for Forever Green field events for a group of 6th grade STEM campers coming through our St. Paul research plots. We chatted for a bit, he made fun of me for being out of breath after going up 1 flight of stairs (in my defense, I’m 7 months pregnant), asked how things were going, and told me he was going to start charging folks for borrowing Forever Green supplies all the time! I laughed and said “the check is in the mail, Don!” as I got on the elevator, not knowing that would be our last interaction, earthside.

He’ll be glad to know we told the damn Forever Green story to those 6th graders (minus the curse words with the kids, I promise). Pictured below. :)

Hannah Stoll, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, PhD Graduate Research Assistant

Don was a great friend and support of MCIA. Besides Nancy Elhke, Don was the one who motivated me to develop and teach Seed Science, Technology, and Society class. He was recognized with Achievement in Crop Improvement Award a few years back. Don was truly a visionary, realistically practical, and influential in many ways that motivated people to accomplish something larger than just the routine things.

He will be missed in a big way!

Fawad Shah, Minnesota Crop Improvement Association

Echoing everyone’s sentiments here… reading stories about Don has been such a special tribute. I was one of Don’s last “official” grad students— though he shaped most every student that passed through Borlaug Hall.

As an advisor, Don was many things (some chaotic, always inspiring) and always had a lesson to teach. But something that I am particularly grateful for is how he deeply shaped how I think. While I may not recall all the different modes of action for herbicide, Don taught me how to think in systems. This approach has shaped my career and my life beyond my profession. Nothing ever happens in isolation.

Which is what these reflections are showing… Don never did anything in isolation. Everything was webbed into a bigger picture, community, landscape. His thread throughout the web was massive and will be thoroughly missed. Each of these stories shows the particulars of his impact. An absolute icon.

The way he taught me to think is part of my daily work and I never miss a chance to let my colleagues know that “you just need to tell the damn story”.

And, of course, to go volunteer at the “damn state fair”.

Rebekah Carlson, Former Graduate Student, Applied Plant Sceinces, UMN

I was the presenter at that last FGI meeting. Right before the presentation (and introducing me to Jeff), Don came up to me, patted me on the back with the usual “How are you young man?” I had a difficult morning, so I answered with what likely came across as a tepid “fine, Don”, and quickly returned the question. Sensing what’s going on, Don locked eyes with me intently, smiled and said something like “very happy, life is good”. I know why he said that.

Don was one of these folks to never give up on being happy.

Walid Sadok, Associate Professor, Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, UMN

Friends,

Don Wyse was the very frame and centerpiece of my working life at UMN, and for that I am very deeply grateful. That said, what I wish to comment on is his behind-the-scenes kindness. Over the course of quite a few conversations, over the years, It became clear to me that Don discreetly provided financial support--and much other support, I am sure--to quite a range of persons in need in and around the university - for example, graduate students needing some bridge funding, or just plain funding in general...that sort of thing. When he mentioned these things to me, it was always with modesty--in an off-hand, under-his-breath sort of way.

I’d like to lift up these quiet acts of charity as we are telling these stories of Don to each other,

Nick Jordan, Professor, Department of Agronomy & Plant Genetics, UMN

Dear all,

I first met Don in the intermediate wheatgrass trial in 2012, days after I joined Jim Anderson’s lab to initiate intermediate wheatgrass breeding. I had seen his picture and knew he was the leading PI of the Intermediate Wheatgrass project, but I did not expect to see him there that day. I was observing the plants and collecting data when I noticed Don with a hoe in his hand, weeding the field under the blazing sun. I felt awkward that a PI was weeding my trial manually. Eventually, we crossed paths and had a brief conversation. My English was not very good at the time, so I could not express myself deeply, but Don made the conversation comfortable. I clearly remember him saying, “Young man, here, we do not have authority; feel free to speak up your ideas.” Don often recounted this encounter with a smile when introducing me to others.

The last time I saw Don was in the intermediate wheatgrass field near Larpenteur Ave when I visited Jim and Prabin in 2022. A decade had passed, and I had worked in several institutions, but little had changed for Don. He hugged me and was still the same supportive, visionary, enthusiastic, and friendly person I had met years ago.

The intermediate wheatgrass project led by Don paved the way for Jim Anderson to accept me as a Research Associate. This opportunity changed my career path, and the five years I spent at the Forever Green Initiative and UMN laid a solid foundation for my development in plant breeding. Don’s mentorship and support have had a lasting impact on my career and life.

Best wishes,

Xiaofei Zhange

Thanks everyone for sharing your stories and photos; it’s heartening to realize there are so many common threads.

My trajectory as a scientist has been influenced and inspired by Don in many ways. Like many of you, he was first a mentor to me, serving on both my Master’s and PhD committees. Of course, always encouraging me to think big-picture (“Don’t just do stuff! What is the long-term strategy?”) while never losing sight of the details ( “What do you know about the mobility of triazines in the xylem?”).

The photo below is of Don, Rich Perrine of Martin SWCD, and Dean Current in 2009. We had driven down to Martin county to meet with some local farmers and scout sites for my very first field study (in January for some reason!). I learned some hard lessons in weed control the following summer (“Do you know how to use hoe, young man?”). What dawned on me looking at this photo today was that Don has been there since the start of my research career - a constant and positive influence throughout. Always a mentor and advocate.

I will certainly miss him a lot, but feel fortunate to have known him.

Josh Gamble, USDA Agricultural Research Service, UMN

An Organic Farmer Meets a Weed Scientist

Well, here’s the damn story

It started nearly 40 years ago when after I had read an article in a farm magazine, I wrote Don a letter asking about a weed science project he was engaged with centering on Canada thistle management. While mowing highway ditches in the summer during his college years it turns out that Don took note of a fact that some patches of Canada thistle would turn yellow for some reason. And then when he was here in Minnesota the recollection of these yellowing thistles in the road ditches while driving to work again surfaced. And now that he was a weed scientist he was going to try and find out the cause.

Fast forward several year and now Don was ready to apply his findings to real farm fields. He assigned a graduate student to the project and he and I worked together for two summers trying to make it work. The failure of Pseudomonas infection to more permanently suppress Canada thistle was one of Don’s greatest disappointments.

However, several years later we came upon the idea of researching the impact on Canada thistle of an organic rotation that included alfalfa. Don had his technician gps map every thistle patch in a 24-acre field and then count each thistle plant in each patch. We did this study through a five-

year rotation mapping and counting every spring at the appropriate time. The end result of this 5-year study was that alfalfa significantly decreased the thistle population and has become the mainstay and primary means for organic farmers to suppress Canada thistle, the most challenging weed in an organic field cropping system.

In fact, shortly after the conclusion of this study Don and I organized a van tour of organic farmers in Southwest Minnesota and spent the day visiting a number of organic farms in the area. And our suspicions were confirmed that farmers who incorporated alfalfa in their organic rotations were more successful overall than those without alfalfa.

Both of these may seem like small and insignificant stories about just another research project. But the real story is how Don was just as deeply interested and concerned about organic farm production issues as he was about conventional systems. To him it has always been about equality.

It was during one of Don’s early visits to the farm to see how the pseudomonas study was progressing that I first began to realize just how great a teacher and mentor he was to me. He and I took some time just that day to sit in the middle of a restored prairie on the farm and carry on the greatest conversation ever about ecosystems.

The reason this conversation still is fixed in my memory is the simple fact that I was an organic farmer, and natural systems was just a given for me. On the other hand most organic farmers had become disillusioned with the university land grant systems as personified by the agriculture Extension Service and its very critical assessment and absence of support for organic farming. But to listen to a weed scientist immersed in the latest and greatest herbicide research talking about ecosystems got my attention.

Don many times complained about organic farmers “throwing stones at the University.” But it was a two-way street and we both knew it. I think from that day on our respect for each other grew to where he could ultimately trust me to be the first board chair of MISA. At the same time my trust for him grew to a level where I could withstand and defend any criticism from my fellow organic farmers who may have perceived me as selling out to the university. And the rest is history for me.

Don would always engage with me not as one who needed to be educated on ways to manage weeds but as a peer. I sat in his office many times for hours on end as many of you have done also based on your stories. To make a farmer feel like the work I was doing every day out in the field was equally as important as the work going on at a premier land grant university became the substance of our bonding. We could challenge each other yet hold the deepest respect for each other’s expertise and life experiences.

Here are three little stories to help convey this bonding.

Shortly before I was asked to apply for the first Endowed Chair for Sustainable Studies I was at the local high school one evening where I directed theatre productions. We were rehearsing for an upcoming production. Don happened to be coming through Madison that evening and stopped at the house to visit. Sally informed him that I was at a rehearsal. So without letting me know he comes walking into the theatre just as the rehearsal was about to begin. His timing was impeccable, but so was the fact that he wanted to see me in my other life. This is a story we have reminisced over many times.

The second and third stories of course have to be about Kernza. Don asked me way back in 2011 if I was interested in growing some intermediate wheat grass. I didn’t know much about it but was always open to try anything where Don was involved. He gave me enough seed for about two acres which Sally and I planted that September.

The first year it appeared as though no one was interested in the project, so I ended up cutting and baling the crop. The second year, however, out of the blue I get this call from Don asking me how the Intermediate wheat grass was doing. I assured him that it was growing quite well and was nearing harvest. “We need to harvest it you know,” he said.

“So how do I harvest this grain? Its not like any other grain crop you know.”

His simply replied. “You’re a farmer. You’ll figure it out.” And we did.

And then seven years later I now had the first field of certified organic MN Clearwater ready to harvest. The challenge was determining when to harvest based on kernel moisture content. The University had a formula they had been using that in part required using a microwave oven, a scale and a brown paper bag.

Don happened to stop by about the time we were contemplating windrowing. He always just seemed to appear just at the most opportune time. This day was one of those times. We went to the field and took our samples and were ready to perform the protocol for determining the moisture level of the grain. So I offered to use Sally’s microwave oven. He would have none of it. He asked if there was an appliance dealer in Madison and so we went to town and purchased a microwave. The appliance dealer was especially curious when I introduced him to Don. In fact he told Don to tell him the whole story as he said I am always curious about what is going on at that farm east of Madison.

And finally on a very personal note Don and I were in Michigan for a Cover Crop Council meeting. Just as we were about to leave for Minnesota I received a call from Sally that my dad had passed away.

Needless to say it was a long trip back. When Don finally asked my why I was so quiet I told him the situation. We spent much of the remainder of that trip talking about our fathers. How our fathers were so much alike and how this father-son relationship, work ethic and sense of responsibility had impacted each of us. Over the years we would occasionally remark about the stories we shared that night.

Don created for me the best of two worlds. One was the opportunity to participate very deeply and intimately in the academic and scientific community as an engaged, respected and appreciated person. The other was being able to at the same time allow myself to live and practice my skills outside this academic community in my organic production system and its evolving ecosystem while accepting and inviting the academic community to participate in my world with the same level of engagement and respect.

In the end the story is about the organic farmer and the weed scientist. We were both farm boys and remained farm boys at heart. We just took different roads that ended up at the same place.

Carmen Fernholz, A-Frame Farm, Madison, MN

Thanks for starting this Mitch. I met Don around 2001 when I was asked to manage the Center for Integrated Natural Resources and Agricultural Management (CINRAM), one of Don’s “child” organizations which he was instrumental in establishing. Don was Co-Director of CINRAM with Ken Brooks of Forest Resources, a tribute to his ability to work across disciplines. My background is forestry/agroforestry and, Don being Don, always gave me a hard time about those “damn trees” but in the good natured way that many of you have described so well. I have memories of printing out project proposals with Don at 3:00 am in the morning in the Agronomy and Plant Genetics offices, and attending meetings of health workers to discuss the relationship between landscape and human health, among others. Whether it was farmers, health care workers, or students and researchers, Don was out there “telling the damn story”, doing it well, and making change. He leaves behind impressive accomplishments and a legacy that will live on. I miss him and celebrate his legacy.

Dean Current, CINRAM UMN

It’s sad to hear of Don’s passing. Don’s career was remarkable, extending from what was once considered “conventional” agriculture to the “unconventional” integrated, sustainable systems of the Forever Green Initiative. In that he was truly visionary. For me working around or with Don was an adventure that began in one of his first Weed Science

classes (‘78 or ‘79). His puckish comments were always the start of a lively conversation but often more. When I was Kent Crookston’s technician Don suggested that we should take a look at four crop rotation/tillage systems in our crop management research. That’s what we did - for three years and with startling yield and plant disease effects. Later when we talked to Don about writing up the results he commented that he wasn’t interested - what he really wanted to do was teach us something. For me he certainly did. That single aspect of the results, plant disease effects, stimulated my interest in the interaction of crop management practices and plant diseases and led to a career in plant pathology. One thing was consistent even after 40 years. I could always expect a lively chat with Don whenever we walked across campus, at Mim’s, or heading out the Borlaug door in the evening.

Dr. James E. Kurle, Associate Professor (retired), Department of Plant Pathology, UMN

whenever a student tells me that they had a tough exam, I tell them about that question. Then they feel better. At least no one asked them THAT question. Who does THAT? [insert laughter]).

My last one-on-one conversation with him was another early evening conversation, June 2023, this time over the phone from my USDA project truck somewhere outside of Fargo. I had just looked at my first successful perennial Lewis flax field, in the latter stages of bloom, and wanted to talk about it. The conversation quickly turned to politics, to activism about women’s rights and the abortion clinic debacle in Fargo-Moorhead, to Pride Month. We talked about his friends and my friends in the LGBTQ community and how important diversity is to fostering creativity. What will happen to this country if we lose those values. What a great conversation!

Maybe he didn’t invent the safe space, but he was an early pioneer. I remember one sign on his door “If you are not pissed off, you are not paying attention!” What great motivation to think about what we do, why we do it, and what the “damn story” is.

As a former graduate student of Don’s, I can relate to the early evening sightings of Don in my plots, hoeing weeds, or early evening conversations in his office that went from a quick update to an hour or more of conversation. I swear he used the words “young man” more than the Village People!

But what really sticks out to me was my first and last interactions with him.

I visited campus for a graduate recruitment day in 2004, looking to complete a PhD in a breeding and genetics lab. I had a list of names of people I wanted to meet, but when I got to campus, my agenda had one name I didn’t recognize. Don Wyse – sunflower and flax breeding. Who was this guy? Ok, whatever. So I meet with him, he tells me he is a weed scientist, and he heard that I just finished a Masters with Walt Fehr at Iowa State (not Don’s “best friend”). He told me the story of MISA, of Green Lands Blue Waters. And then he asked me if I wanted to do something completely different than what I was doing and help him and Kevin Betts develop a perennial sunflower and perennial flax. “Just one plant. All we need is just one perennial plant that looks like a sunflower.” Ok, Don, that’s not really how that works, but his story got me. Later that day, I asked him if he had more time to talk, and that day my plans of having a career as an industry corn breeder were forever ruined.

We had a lot in common. I was a Minnesota farm kid (he would always say I was an Iowa farm kid). He was an Ohio farm kid. We both were raised in really conservative churches, the ones where the old men sat together in a separate section from their families. We had deep philosophical discussions about religion, civil rights, world governance. He asked me a question about religion for my dissertation defense exam. (To this day,

Best wishes to you all during this difficult time.

Brent Hulke

Hearing all of these stories is such a wonderful tribute to Don and so uplifting to see his inspiration continue to grow. I will borrow from a technique employed in one of our facilitated strategic planning sessions of coming up with single words to capture a goal, mission, or vision to add to the list of words describing Don - “challenging”. That is not to say that Don was challenging (as an adjective), although at times he could be that, but rather that Don was always challenging (as a verb). Challenging the status quo, the administration, and his colleagues to think broadly and be bold and take on challenging projects. In 2014, Don approached me and others about working on silphium in collaboration with The Land Institute. At the time I was transitioning our spring barley breeding program from six-row to two-row and I had started a winter breeding program. So the thought of adding a completely unrelated species that researchers had just begun to domesticate was a bit daunting. Fast forward ten years and several graduate students later and I have found myself with a line of research that captured my interest in using plant breeding not only as a way to develop new varieties, but as a means to create opportunities to shape the future of agriculture. I have always found Don particularly inspirational in that sense - how can we direct our research to make change with broader impact and address the big challenges.

Don also shaped the way I think about HOW we meet those challenges. As a graduate student, I was very much immersed in the model of

funding research through competitive grants. Shortly after I joined the faculty in Agronomy and Plant Genetics, I heard him tell the story of the “demise of the Agricultural Experiment Station”. I was not familiar with this hard funding that provided a research foundation that allowed for nimble responses to novel ideas and exploring somewhat riskier approaches. I quickly learned how long it would take to go from a great idea to a grant proposal to reviewers to possible funding to implementing research. Don understood that the flexible and reliable funding that was provided through the experiment station was essential to maintain impactful research that was responsive to the current needs. While I am still fortunate to have some of that support, I too saw it diminish over the years. I realized that is why Don invested so much of his time “telling the damn story” to advocate for directed resources that could support important resources and complement competitive grant funding toward a common vision. And we all know how tremendously successful he was at that.

As one of the (apparently many) “young men” that were inspired by Don, I too will miss him and am grateful to all the ways that he has touched our lives.

Kevin P. Smith, Professor, Plant Breeding and Genetics, Dept. Agronomy and Plant Genetics, UMN

The news of Don Wyse’s injury and passing was a huge shock to me. I had just seen him the day before his accidental fall loading a van full of people on another excursion to see the Forever Green Initiative plots on campus. I was just coming through the parking lot toward Borlaug Hall when I saw him and was thinking of ribbing him with some comment about whether he had a proper license endorsement to be driving a 15-passenger van. But I hesitated and he shut the door and drove off. Little did I know it would be the last time I would see him alive. At some irrational level, I refuse to accept that Don won’t be coming back to campus and holding court with his colleagues in his usual way. But this fantasy will not come true, unfortunately. My heart goes out to his family with the deepest of condolences for their loss.

Don was an amazing person and really a force of nature. And as others have said he was a visionary. He was also a catalyst for engaging people around a mission. It is a difficult task to organize academics--much like herding cats--but Don had the ability to cajole people into the fold and toward a common goal.

My relationship with Don was different from his colleagues in the Agronomy and Plant Genetics Department and the many other people he worked with in other agencies. You see, I was from that other department across the way: Plant Pathology. When I first started my current position

in late 2000, I ran into Don and asked him if he remembered me being in his Weed Science class when I was an undergraduate. I fully expected him to say “no” since I took the class in 1979! But he said he did remember me (probably a fib) and asked me what grade I got in the class. I said: “An ‘A’ of course, look it up!”

After being in the department for several years, I had many conversations with Don about various topics from the weather to politics and the university administration as we walked from our vehicles to the building. Don and I both drove POC (Piece of Crap) vehicles: me a 1993 Dodge Dakota truck and Don a beat-up Jeep of an uncertain vintage.

We had a challenge as to who could drive their POC vehicle the longest. My Dodge gave up the ghost in 2010 on a last furniture moving run and it was donated to MPR. That week I left a simple message on the windshield of Don’s Jeep: it read: YOU WON! He knew exactly what that meant and had a good hearty laugh about it.

I always found Don to be insightful and funny in his comments. I laughed when he teased me in his light-hearted way, but also was able to dish it right back to him.

Don directed his granddaughter Lara to come and talk to me about a job on my project. She sure impressed me as a smart and vivacious young woman. I wanted to recruit Lara for an undergraduate research project in plant pathology, but she had other interests. But I did ask her if she could do one favor for me. I told her to go up to her grandpa and say, “Gosh grandpa you must be really old because I just talked with an older looking professor who said he took a class from you when he was an undergraduate of my age!”

Although I am a plant pathologist, I had the crazy idea of trying to breed winter durum for the Upper Midwest. The Fusarium head blight epidemics in the 1990s and 2000s had wreaked havoc on the crop as did the more recent droughts in the Durum Triangle. With Kevin Smith’s success in breeding winter barley for the Upper Midwest, I thought, “why not winter durum”? So the research started out as a small “bootleg” project with just a few accessions being tested for winter survival. We now have some advanced durum lines with winter survival rates of 100%. When Ahmad Sallam and I informed Don about our results, he was really excited, and we ultimately were able to obtain some funds from the Forever Green Initiative (FGI) to expand the breeding effort on winter durum. Don promoted our fledgling project to every group who took the crop tour of FGI crops on campus. Although Don sometimes admonished me for not keeping the weeds out of the plot (he was a weed scientist after all!), I sincerely appreciated Don’s support of my project.

As a new member of the FGI in 2023 I volunteered to work the State Fair booth at a time slot when Don was present. My reasoning was that I

wanted to learn from the “Master.” I never saw anyone who could work the crowd like Don. And he seemed to know everyone! I am glad that I had the idea to take a selfie at the FGI booth with Don, which is attached.

Rest in Peace Don! We miss you already and will work as hard as we can to carry on your mission!

Brian Steffenson, Dept of Plant Pathology, UMN

Reading the stories about “Forever Green” Dr. Don Wyse was great. As a new faculty member, I haven’t spent many years with him in the department but I have several sweet memories to share. I will try to put a few of them here in words and would love to talk about them for the rest of my life.

Great Don Wyse and his vision for the future of Weed Science

I arrived at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2013 as an international graduate student in Weed Science, grappling with cultural adjustments in those early weeks. One evening after office hours, as I sat in my graduate office pondering the future career prospects with a Weed Science degree, I decided to explore what lay ahead. A quick Google search for “future in Weed Science career” led me to an article from 1992 in the Weed Technology journal titled “Future of Weed Science Research” by Don. I didn’t know who Donald L. Wyse was at the time, but his insightful words deeply resonated with me. He wrote: “Weed scientists must decide if they are going to lead the direction of weed science research or be led reluctantly by others.” Seven years later, when I received an offer to join this department as one of his Weed Science colleagues, he was one of the reasons that I didn’t think twice before accepting this offer. In fact, he was the second person who met with me in person after I joined. It was COVID time and no one was coming to campus at that time, but he called me on my cell phone and met me on the St. Paul campus, and showed me the forever green plots.

Scary

Don and a memorable interview

During the interview process for my current position, I had two campus visits. By the second visit, I was feeling fairly confident about receiving an offer. However, my meeting with Don during that visit was particularly memorable. Scheduled for 30 minutes but extended to 45, Dr. Wyse commandeered 15 minutes of Gary’s time to have a deeper conversation with me. Dr. Wyse began by asking, “Tell me, young man, what kind of research will you do when you get this position?” Before I could respond, he added, “Don’t tell me that you will only work on herbicides. Herbicides are dead.” This unexpected challenge caught me off guard, and I paused to gather my thoughts. He continued, “You know these

damn pigweeds, right? And you probably know what’s going on with the herbicide resistance?” When I acknowledged this, he said, “Give me a solution for that, and I’ll take you to Gary and ask him to give you an offer letter today.” For a moment, his directness intimidated me. However, the ensuing conversation turned out to be very engaging. I proposed various ideas, but his response was often, “You know what I am going to tell you, right? These are BS. You know that I tried them all and they don’t work.”

Finally, after what felt like a daunting 45-minute discussion, Dr. Wyse escorted me to Gary’s office and told him, “Hire him, he’s the guy you’re looking for.” The relief I felt at that moment was immense!

Don, the Extension Specialist

When I was still new in my job, Don paid a visit to my office. With a friendly demeanor, he announced, “Let me do Extension to an Extension Specialist.” He then unloaded several packets of Kernza pasta, Kernza flour, and Kernza cereals onto my desk, along with a stack of pamphlets about pennycress. “Have you heard about the Forever Green program?” he inquired. I responded, “Of course.” He went on to explain, “It’s a program developed by Weed Scientists for weed control, and I’ll explain how.” For the next hour, Don enthusiastically discussed the Forever Green program, capturing my interest with his passion. Before leaving, he handed me the Kernza products and asked me to review their taste, though I’ll leave those details aside for now. As he was heading out, he gave my shoulder a playful pinch and asked, “Do you think I can be a good Extension person?” His smiling face at that moment is something I’ll always remember.

Travel guide, Don

In the summer of 2022, my dad and father-in-law, both retired high school teachers from India and in their early 70s, came to the United States to visit us. During one of our Weed Science Field Days in Rosemount, they joined me to see the research plots and watch my presentation. Don was also present that day. When Don met my dad and father-in-law, he immediately engaged them in conversation. Although their native language isn’t English, and they struggled with the American accent, Don conversed with them throughout the Field Day. At the end of the day, I mentioned to Don that he might have found it difficult to understand them due to their limited English proficiency. Don replied, “No, not at all. Now I can tell you a lot about them. Do you want to know? I understood them.” He then shared, “Let me tell you a story. I’m the travel guide for the Indian parents in my neighborhood.” I was intrigued. He continued, “We have a few Indian families nearby, and their parents know about the Green Revolution and Dr. Norman Borlaug, but they didn’t realize our university played a crucial role in his success. I’ve taken two separate groups of Indian parents to campus on weekends, showing them around and taking family pictures near the Norman Borlaug statue.”

That was Don. He will be deeply missed, yet he remains ever-present through his groundbreaking work, his insightful wisdom, his sharp wit, and his warm smile. He has left a lasting impact on everyone who had the privilege to know him. Below are some of the photos

Debalin Sarangi, Assistant Professor, Agronomy and Plant Genetics, UMN

streak of many years in which all of his undergraduate workers went on to graduate school (she got a Nursing degree after Agronomy). She’s seen him at the Fair most years since (how could you not, he’s there every day!) and reminisced. He would update us on his family - always with a big smile, swelling with pride.

Hi Everyone,

I am at a loss for words so I will borrow from Don and “just write the damn email”. He built a program that frames so many other programs, he mentored countless students (myself included) on how to think in ways that can fundamentally improve agriculture. I will always appreciate how Don could professionally navigate corporate, government and other entrenched power structures while in his heart he was a bit of a rebel. I appreciate how he joked and poked, he made sure we never took ourselves too seriously, while at the same time he was truly supportive and respectful.

Don pushed us to re-think the system in ways that are action-oriented so our research could have a meaningful impact. Here is a quintessential, gritty Don story. As a graduate student, Don asked me “did you learn anything from your research that I did not already know?” I have to admit the answer is probably no, nothing truly novel, and certainly nothing Don would agree was novel. But I went on to say it is the new synthesis of old ideas to solve a current challenge is where the novelty is. We cannot even measure Don’s impact because Don pressed us to rethink the “how” and those skills are going to have lasting impact in all of our careers and lives.

We “stand on the shoulders of giants” could not be more true for Don. What an honor to have known him and worked with him.

He will be dearly missed.

James Eckberg

Here’s what I wrote to some former students upon learning of Don’s tragic fall: “Many of us wouldn’t be where we’re at or doing what we are without his presence and influence on our lives and work. He touched so many as a Visionary who connected the dots and made it happen.” The stories in this thread are testament to his influence, impact, and legacy.

The photo is from the 2016 State Fair, Don with my wife, Janet. She worked for him as undergraduate 1985-86. He kidded her for breaking a

You can only say no to Don for so long. I had been an observer of Forever Green for many years, but added my name as one of several coPIs on a grant that would launch the UMN’s intermediate wheatgrass breeding program in 2011. Don was the PI. The grant was finished and as Don was leaving my office the day it was submitted, I asked him “what’s the chance this gets funded?” He responded “less than 10%”, so I didn’t give it much thought until weeks later when he told me the grant was funded. Lee DeHaan at The Land Institute provided the initial germplasm and 13 years later, under the guidance of Drs. Xiaofei Zhang and Prabin Bajgain and much support from Forever Green personnel and industry we’ve released one variety, MN-Clearwater, with another on the

way. Two PhD students, Kayla Altendorf and Hanna Stoll, have produced significant findings, researching IWG genetics/breeding. All of this was done under the ever-watchful eye of Don.

I’ve told many why I thought the timing was right for plant breeders to get involved in Forever Green at that time: 1) I believed in what Forever Green was trying to accomplish and new plant materials were needed; 2) new, cheaper DNA sequencing technologies made domestication and improvement of new crops affordable and faster; and 3) this generation of students and postdocs are attracted to this mission. All of these are still true 14 year later. Our pennycress breeding began in 2013 led by MS candidate at the time, Kayla Altendorf, then postdoc Katherine Frels in 2015, and Dr. Julia Zhang in 2022. Zenith Tandukar completed a Ph.D. on pennycress genetics in 2022. Winter camelina was started in 2015 by then-Ph.D. student and current postdoc Matt Ott. Working with numerous collaborators in Forever Green, improved germplasm of these species will be in grower’s fields soon. Every year I’m amazed at how many new names are on the Forever Green email list - more lives touched.

I’ll miss Don’s presence in the fields on the St. Paul campus, driving around his Prius. He was a keen observer of everything when the crop was in the ground. I’ve seen him on a tractor - tidying up plots, irrigating, weeding - whatever necessary to produce the best data. He loved to chastise the plant breeders for letting weeds get out of control in our plots (yeah, we had some HUGE pigweed one year).

As many have commented, Don was great with students and they loved and respected him. Don was in charge of the graduate student seminar class for several years. He put so much of his time into preparing those students, including evenings and weekends of one-on-one coaching when necessary to improve their presentation between the Thursday dry run and Monday afternoon seminar. As many have said, his main message was “tell your damn story” and that was a good lesson for all of us.

Don made sure we were all supported. If there was anything he could do to help, he would do it. The absence of his larger-than-life personality, kindness, and smile will leave a void in the department and many lives, including mine.

Jim Anderson, Professor, Agronomy and Plant Genetics, UMN

I was deeply saddened to learn of Don’s injury and passing, and pray that his family will be blessed with a sense of peace.

I have been aware of Don for over 20 years – his PhD advisor at Michigan State University, Don “Doc” Penner, was on my dissertation committee. The “word” from some of the other students was that “Doc” was not all that impressed with some of the direction of Don’s work – but after reading many memories I realize that they shared some commonalities – working long hours at the office and field, creative in looking for practical solutions that would make farming systems better, always willing to talk and listen and ask questions that made you challenge your assumptions, and adept at working the phones to make progress on big goals.

Don was very gracious in welcoming me to the “Minnesota” Weed Science team when I started with the USDA-ARS in 2023. He strongly encouraged me to apply for FGI funding and build collaborations with Gregg Johnson and Debalin Sarangi. He included me in brainstorming sessions on the future of Weed Science at the University of Minnesota and impressed me with his willingness to seek out perspectives that were different from his own. At the North Central Weed Science Society’s annual meeting in Minneapolis in Dec 2023, he invited me to join him for what became a delightful conversation after an evening award ceremony where I was also blessed to meet his daughter Dawn, learn of his love for teaching weed science, and his delight at having been able to teach his grandchildren. And the first phone call I received on the land-line in my office was from Don with a project idea and an invitation to help make it happen.

I will be forever grateful for him making me feel valued as a colleague. He was generous with his time, humor, and love.

Mark Bernards, Research Agronomist (Weed Science), USDA ARS

Like so many of you, I too became part of more than one of Don’s big ideas, including my years with Green Lands Blue Waters, a Wyse legacy. In my first week with GLBW, Don popped into my office and recruited me to “do something useful” and get my hands dirty. Minutes later, in my fresh from Washington DC sport coat, dress pants, and polished shoes, I was transplanting Kernza seedlings with Lee DeHaan and others contributing to this Wyse storybook. Connecting people is one of Don’s lasting gifts to us all.

On a seemingly random stop by my office in the fall of 2014, it was Don who suggested that GLBW should take over a 31 acre Kernza field in Rosemount that had belonged to Patagonia Provisions. They will plow it up if you don’t “do something useful” with it. The grain harvested from

that field over the next two years supported research projects in Food Science and Nutrition; fed patrons of the Birchwood Cafe, The Perennial restaurant in San Francisco, and Bien Cuit bakery in New York City; and supplied early Kernza product innovators in the Twin Cities, including General Mills and Bang Brewing.

Reading of your many, many life-changing interactions with Don brings me to tears. I will miss those late afternoon visits to Don’s office, clearing stacks of papers from the chair, and being part of his visionary dreams. I last saw Don a few weeks ago, a random encounter outside the Cargill Building, which led to a personal guided tour, in his Prius, of the FG fields. Thank you Don!

Richard Warner, Senior Analyst, The Land Institute - International Initiative

and am eager to continue this project that Don was so excited about.

There’s a saying in Sanskrit which roughly translates to ‘Wise ones are not driven by prosperity or lack of it’. This could not have been truer in Don’s case as we all know that he was in it for the greater good. No doubt that he will be sorely missed. But it also has been a tremendous honor to have the opportunity of working alongside him.

Prabin Bajgain, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, UMN

It has been surreal and like others, I too do not want to believe that Don is no longer around despite the reality. Just yesterday afternoon, I was in the field evaluating perennial rye accessions. After every few minutes of walking through some rows/columns of plants, I’d take a pause and raise my head to look away from the tablet. In the past, this is when I’d quite frequently see Don pull up next to my fields in his car. He’d walk towards me with his trademark gleeful grin and say - “Have you doubled the yields yet?” No Prius drove by yesterday, and that was when it finally hit me hard that we are to continue his work without him. It was a gut-wrenching moment.

Don said to me a few times - “Don’t get married to a crop.” I suppose, this was his way of indicating that not all FGI crops might be successful. This had a direct impact on my work and as a result, few additional perennial grain species are now a part of FGI’s portfolio. One recent project I was working with him (and Helene Murray) is on perennial oats. This species is native to Algeria from where I wanted to source some seeds, and Helene connected me with an Algerian scientist she knew. After some email exchanges and phone calls with this scientist, Helene and I spoke with Don to loop him in. More importantly, I needed some funds to sponsor our Algerian collaborator’s seed collection trip. I am sure many of us have run up to him when in need of help, monetary or otherwise, to support activities outside of what a grant allows.

As soon as he heard about it, Don was very enthusiastic and extremely supportive. Turns out, he had been trying to explore the genetic potential of the species since the late Howard Rines (USDA-ARS oat geneticist) showed him a few plants some years before he retired. Because of Rines’ retirement and declining health, his oat germplasm collection became inaccessible, I believe. Don was ecstatic to learn about this new connection we had established and green lit FGI’s sponsorship of the seed collection trip in Algeria. I am in the final steps of importing those seeds

Dr. Wyse was an amazing human being, scientist, and visionary that challenged us to think differently, bigger and broader for the sake of building a better tomorrow. Always inclusive, walking along side you and willing to steer you in the direction you didn’t know you needed to go. Now the challenge is ours, to take these learnings and visionary goals forward to create a better tomorrow.

Dr. Wyse was my professor but first and always my father.

Dawn Wyse Pester

I was saddened and surprised by Don’s passing. Even through limited interactions with Don, one thing that stood out is Don’s exceptional level of commitment. His commitment was outstanding not only in the research work and mission of Forever Green, but resoundingly with students. I remember seeing Don and observing his interactions with students at a Kernza meeting, where he was engagingly quizzing students and recent graduates about various professional possibilities. He wasn’t just going through the academic checkboxes, but was legitimately interested in each student and their opportunities. I think Don’s genuine interest in people, research, and projects propelled all of us forward, and he will be deeply missed. Extending my sincere condolences to Don’s family, UMN coworkers, and colleagues.

Jared Crain, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Plant Pathology, Kansas State University

From the moment I joined the Dept. of Agronomy and Plant Genetics in 1986 it was clear that I hadn’t met a Professor quite like Don.

As others have said, he was a force of nature. Constantly thinking and organizing and pushing boundaries.

Occasionally we would argue and sometimes I “wasn’t buying what he was selling” but he was always an advocate for me in the Dept., especially when I would stray from more “traditional expectations” of how an Extension Weed Scientist was to be conducting their program. Thanks Don, I needed the help!

As I look back, our occasional arguments were less over substance and more over style and temperament. But that should be no surprise as this listserv is proof that there is only one Don Wyse.

However, we did clash fairly significantly once in my pre-tenure days over the long-term viability of Extension. Don was playing devil’s advocate and I took the bait. Over the course of the discussion I grew quite animated and tried to make a specific point by jabbing my index finger into his left shoulder.

Not cool under any circumstances, especially if you are an untenured professor. After I withdrew my rude digit he said to me “I see you feel strongly about this” and then laughed.

From then on, whenever we had a discussion that brought out differences of opinion he would look down to his left shoulder and we would both laugh. FYI, I am much better behaved now.

Don was indeed a systems thinker and he worked very hard with

undergraduate and graduate students to develop that ability. He would spend as much time as necessary working with each student in the APS graduate seminar to “learn how to tell the damn story”. Thanks for reminding me of that quote Kayla.

One aspect of Don’s ~50 year tenure in the Dept. that I would like to point out is the trajectory of Don’s research program over the years. Don’s primary focus was perennial weed management (quackgrass) in a perennial crop (turfgrass). Not an easy task. He also explored the biocontrol of Canada thistle (another perennial), developed a type of herbicide resistant corn, and did extensive water quality work. Over time he became disenchanted with one-off grants for specific projects and began the process of integration and systems thinking. Starting with the MN Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, Green Lands Blue Waters, Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships and the Forever Green Initiative. It was a long process with many ups and downs but based on my readings on this listserv, Don did achieve his long-sought after goal and I could tell he was proud of the work being done by all of you.

Side note - if you see Canada thistle with white leaves on the upper part of the plant at this time of the summer this is what he investigated. He first discovered it while stuck in traffic on I-35 on his way to and from his home in Wyoming, MN.

Bev, Dawn, Ryan and the rest of your family, my wife Karla and I would like to express our sincere condolences on the passing of Don.

Jeff Gunsolus, Emeritus Professor, Dept of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, UMN

A few of my many remembrances of Don Wyse

Plaid pants in an early U of M Faculty member photo (I actually had a pair from that era, my Iowa State U days)

Hosted the family Weed Sci events at his place. Remember seeing his dad and he interact at one of them, two peas in a pod, though perhaps two different species of Pisum.

He was the one that came to my office when first hired, got me out to drive around to show me the lay of the metro landscape, showing possible housing options.

Never got that “darn” Canth seed flight paper out... well meaning but very different outcome over that push regarding my function within the department. Recently joked I would get that out when he gets Pseudomonas implemented.

In our later efforts, Don was concerned should I succeed in the decades long effort to get the C. scrobicollis weevil approved for garlic mustard biocontrol, it may attack his new pennycress crop - a concern I somewhat mischievously set in his mind. Kept reminding him flea beetles LOVE Brassicaceae, and there is a weed for every occasion, including winter annual crops. You just have to get enough of the new thing around, the challenges will follow. We loved to spar back and forth on the ‘cracks’ in his big ideas. Just entertainment factor though, his big ideas were worthy.

Don’s in-law Paul Sprankle replaced Norm Probst as my boss in my closing stretch with Monsanto before coming to U of M. Al Kern was in management in my Monsanto days, turns out, Al and Don were in grad school together at MSU. We mused how Jerry Caulder, Director of Product Development when I interned with Monsanto in 1976, and Al went to Monsanto, made it big, really big, as their genetic engineering startup was purchased as that technology moved into commodity crops and chemical manufactures bought up seed companies, and Don was... well... still here. He loved being “here”.

As Jeff G. mentioned, Extension challenges often came up with Don. He really got it, but often wanted to circumvent it. He always had great ideas of the things Jeff G., Bev D. and I could do.

Though often well masked, always a farm kid at heart. Very religious formative years on the farm, connected there, explained a lot...

Jeff G. covered his career transitions well. Don was our bridge to the original founders, our major profs were super star Weed Scientists ver. 1.0 of the young discipline housed in Weed Science/NCWSS. Don was ver. 1.5. Jeff G., Bev D. and I ver. 2.0 with Debalin and his colleagues 3.0 carrying the discipline forward. I think our society is in good hands thanks in part to the foundation Don helped build.

Never Social Committee Chair, but always there as the official taster before opening of the wine and cheese mixer to make sure we ‘had the right stuff’.

Always a weed scientist, as burdens many in the discipline, he could not resist pulling the unwanted plants of the world when spotted.

Debalin S. mentioned the Future of Weed Science Research paper that inspired him as a student. It was from the 1991 WSSA Symposia on the Future of Weed Science, Louisville KY. Don was, as were I and many others, heavily involved in water quality at the time. He presented the research portion for that symposium later published as the Future of Weed Science Research paper that inspired Debalin years later, very emblematic of how forward thinking Don was. Key is forward, should have seen the faces on his peers in the audience when Don laid it out in

the society keynote, discussed concepts that became MISA; Green Lands, Blue Waters; and Forever Green with seasonal brown spots, dead zone in the gulf, diverse crops - laid out all the steps needed to transition beyond herbicides...... only problem was it was about a decade and a half too soon for many in that audience to wrap their heads around.

The 2023 NCWSS happened to be in Mpls last December, so Don attended after a long hiatus, was a memorable reunion for him. His 1st student, Phil Westra, CSU was there, as were many others he had touched over the years. Definitely looked and felt right at home.

Don asked how I was doing re: health a few weeks back where I confessed, though 6 years his junior, I felt it may be time to retire and asked “How you do it, how do you keep up this pace?” His paraphrased answer ‘I’m doing alright. If you love what you are doing, why not keep doing it’.

He passed with his boots on so to speak, loving what he was doing, being the consummate integrator.

My deepest sympathies to Bev, Ryan, Dawn and their extended families.

Roger Becker, Professor, Agronomy and Plant Genetics, UMN

Steve Larson passed on your email to me. This is terrible news, but thanks for getting the word out.

Please pass on my condolences to Don’s family. Here is a little story and a picture.

I met Don in February 1993 at the Weed Science Society of America conference. I had just finished my M.S. degree at Utah State University in Logan and was unemployed and wondering what to do with my life. He invited me to come to the University of Minnesota to pursue a Ph.D. with him and Nancy Ehlke, and in April I showed up with my small family and started on my degree. For the next four years, Don frequently harassed me about which one of us was drunk when he invited me to Minnesota (it wasn’t me!) and how us “western kids think that spices consist of salt, pepper, and ketchup” as we discussed about thinking outside of the box. He was adamant about and instilled in me a passion for doing research that actually benefitted agriculture in rural America - for my Ph.D. project it was his beloved grass/forage seed industry in northern Minnesota. As I neared the completion of my degree, I was honored that Don thought enough of me to be invited to the wedding celebration for Todd Pester (fellow graduate student) and his daughter Dawn. As I heard this tragic news, I felt very fortunate that I had just came back in May to the University of Minnesota for the Hayes-Phillips award ceremony.

Don dropped everything and spent an hour with me, updating me on the Forever Green Initiative and his family, and making my wife feel special by calling her my daughter and saying she hadn’t aged a bit. We reminisced about departmental coffee breaks and how the best research ideas came over a game of cards. And he got especially excited when I told him I’d done some genetic work on grass-legume mixtures using Kernza as my test population. I think he was a little proud of himself when he could see that I’d expanded my spices ‘a little’ beyond “salt, pepper, and ketchup”!

Don will be missed by many. I know that our initial introduction at the Weed Science conference forever changed my life.

Beverly, Dawn, Todd, and the family - you are in our thoughts and prayers.

Sincerely,

Blair Waldron, Research Geneticist, USDA ARS

Hi all,

I wanted to chime in to share an oral history of Don that was written in 2021 by Scott Peters, in case you haven’t already encountered it. Don is introduced on page 98 of the article, attached below.

The piece gets at an aspect of Don that I greatly appreciated-- his capacity to deftly balance his identities as both a scientist and political agent. He’d often profess his amazement that the University ever hired him with his encyclopedia-thick criminal record (he’d indicate the robustness of the record with his hands, which might vary a bit depending on his mood that day) from political actions in his younger years. He’d go on to remind graduate students that there was still a lot in the world to get angry about and would threaten to grab his placard and start marching around the St. Paul campus in protest. On the one hand, these stories were entertaining and Don liked to make people laugh. Meanwhile, he was reminding students of their agency outside of the scientific enterprise and assuring us that having political ideologies would not compromise our worth as agricultural scientists. Scott’s writing gets at this aspect more elegantly than I have here.

Tara Conway, Graduate Student, Agronomy and Plant Genetics, UMN

SEE LINK: jstor.org/stable/48758506

One evening this spring, late in the day I saw Don’s black Prius crawling slowly between plots. I had a challenge I wanted to discuss with him, so I chased him down on my bike. I greeted him by saying, “I’m starting to understand why old professors like you don’t want to retire.” --“I’ll tell you why. It’s that after working my ass off all these years I’m finally seeing results and it’s too much damn fun.”

I am one of many who can thank Don for helping me find my calling. The vision of an agricultural system modelled after the natural ecosystems of a place had already been instilled in me by Wes Jackson during an internship at the Land Institute over twenty years earlier, but it wasn’t until I started working with hazelnuts that I found a good fit for myself, a project I could really believe in. Although Don wasn’t the one who introduced me to them, he was the one who made it possible for me to make hazelnuts my life’s work. That grew out of a conversation Don and I had while riding back from one of Linda Meschke’s winter workshops in Fairmont, probably winter 2007.

In November 2007, Don brought together everyone working on hazelnuts in our region and beyond, including flying in Tom Molnar, a young hazelnut breeder from Rutgers U. The Upper Midwest Hazelnut Development Initiative, “UMHDI”, was born out of that meeting. I was always amazed at how Don seemed to know the right people to pull into a team. Another of Don’s protégé’s Jason Fischbach, who worked on Illinois bundleflower, a former candidate “Third Crop” when he was a graduate student here, and who is now of UW Extension, has been key to building UMHDI.

Don also saw to it that, although never richly funded, we always had just enough to keep going.

Lois Braun, Hazelnut Breeder, Forever Green Initiative, UMN

I first met Don while I was a graduate student working in the dept in Dave Somers’ lab in the early 90s. Occasionally, he would come into Dave’s lab and engage me in long discussions. Don would describe a new big idea he had and I would be immediately excited about the possibilities. Subsequently, I started eating lunch with Don, we met many times and these conversations always seemed to turn towards sustainable agriculture. This was before sustainable agriculture was mainstream and before Don became the MISA director. Looking back, some of these conversations he talked with me about were the seeds of the Forever Green Initiative. I used to joke with Don that I taught him everything he knew about sustainable agriculture. Of course, this was not true. When I became a faculty member I would occasionally stop by Don’s office to talk and also to seek mentoring. Don was always patient with me but pushing me at the same time. On many occasions these conversations lasted well beyond

the normal work day and he never once said he needed to leave before the conversation was completed. As a senior member of the faculty I still talked with him on a regular basis. His enthusiasm and drive were always evident and he continued to teach me through his actions of how to organize groups to tackle large problems. He was a terrific member of our faculty, and as others have said “larger than life”. I will miss him deeply.

Gary Muehlbauer, Professor, Agronomy and Plant Genetics, UMN

In reading everyone’s stories, I feel even more connected to all of you, as though Don spun us all together in a web that we may not have even known existed.

(I can’t tell you how many times I tried to introduce Don to someone, only to discover he already knew them, “Oh yes, we go back years...”, he’d say and then launch into a detailed story about the grant, initiative, project or idea they worked on together.)

Don Wyse trained in weed science and tried

To buck the corporate tide

Then he turned on his hard-working visionary side In which row crops were decried

Becoming a thorn in the status quo’s side While organics and perennials were tried It was clear that markets decide Which type of agriculture presides So he built up relationships allied Consisting of people who never lied With organizations like MISA, RSDP & FGI where networking was tried While legislators, MDA and agricultural companies complied So sad that he died

Leaving behind his high school bride

May his memory always reside In the halls of academic pride

May his vision come true and never be belied

David J. Mulla, Professor, Dept of Soil, Water & Climate, UMN

As I read the many wonderful tributes to Don, I realize that Don and I had a different kind of relationship. He was not my mentor, although he was an excellent mentor to many. He was not my advisor; again, he was a great advisor to many. The psychologist Maslow defined a pyramid of human needs, from the very basic to its peak, transcendence – “… behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature…” From what I know and what I read in so many people’s comments, Don clearly fits that description of the highest level of humanity. However, as we sat many times in my office to discuss science, science politics, and problems near to us, the description that defined us was even higher – we called each other friends. I miss him.

Jerry D. Cohen, Professor, Dept of Horticultural Sciences, UMN

Now I begin to see and understand how important his web of farmers, scientists, chefs, CEOs, directors and educators, breeders, writers and artists, neighbors, legislators and citizens and so many others are to ensuring his necessary and important ideas become realized. I’m proud to be part of his web and to be “webbed” with all of you.

I heard this poem this weekend and thought I’d share it with you. Maya Angelou (see page 2) says what I want to say and how I want to say it, especially the final lines.

Constance Fernholz Carlson, Assistant Statewide Director, RSDP

Thoughts on Don Wyse.

Reading all of the great stories and tributes about Don has been both a comfort and a revelation. Hearing from so many of Don’s colleagues, former students, friends, and family has helped me see Don’s life and work in a much fuller context. As I’ve read all of your memories and appreciations of Don, I’ve been moved by the way a life lived with purpose and heart can leave such a powerful and lasting legacy.

I’ve known Don for more than a decade, and for the past six or seven years, he has been a close colleague and thought partner.

As the leader of a river conservation organization, I’ve spent the better part of three decades trying to figure out how to address the wicked problem of agriculture’s massive impact on our lakes and rivers, our birds, bees, and butterflies, and human health. For many years I thought we should treat agriculture the same way we treat our industrial point-source polluters: through the regulatory framework of the Clean Water Act. But as we began to ask ourselves what kind of measures would actually be needed to reduce the massive burden of nutrients, sediments, and other pollutants coming from our ag lands, we realized the answer was something that regulations couldn’t deliver — living vegetation on the landscape, at a scale of millions of acres.

This was, of course, Don’s insight, and though he wasn’t the first to make this realization he does deserve much of the credit for founding

a research program to deliberately accomplish the goal by training the muscle and acumen of a major research institution on developing the crops that markets would value. The market can pull what regulations fail to compel. As Don reminded me approximately 4,987 times, “Without the germplasm, you don’t have a damn thing!”

But Don also understood that having brilliant germplasm wasn’t going to be enough to bring about the scale of transformation needed to address the adverse ecological and social impacts of our current agricultural systems. He knew he would have to broaden his approach beyond the plant breeding and agronomy labs on the St. Paul campus.

The vision of living plants in the ground year-round… of a diversity of perennial and winter annual crops in longer rotations with our summer annual commodities and grazing animals, on millions of acres of Minnesota farmland, would require markets that didn’t exist yet and supply chains that hadn’t been built. It would require private investment as well as public funding and policy to power the research, de-risk the crops, and catalyze market demand.

Don had the humility to know what he didn’t know. He made it his business to build relationships with farmers, businesses, both large and small, policymakers, and policy advocates like me. He ensnared many of us with the salience of his vision and his inexhaustible enthusiasm.

Working together with Don, Nick Jordan and others we founded the Forever Green Partnership to coordinate a multi-sector strategy to coordinate the three legs of the stool: Research and development of new crops and agronomics, commercialization, adoption and scaling of those crops and societal lift to create the social and public policy conditions for the vision to succeed.

One of the astounding things about Don’s career was that, as far as I could ever tell, he simply wasn’t daunted by the complexity of the problem or the length of time that would be required to build all the pieces and fit them together. He wasn’t patient. If anything, he had a healthy impatience to work faster and smarter. Don was always willing to put in the work and take the time needed to move the vision forward. If we needed him to drop everything and get up to the Capitol to testify at a hearing on a Forever Green funding bill, he’d be there with his charm dialed to 11. When I asked him to get up early on a Saturday morning and come talk about our partnership to our board of directors, he showed up early with a big smile on his face.

As some of you have noted, Don could rub some people the wrong way. He would often take ten minutes to tell you what he could have said in five but he compensated for that with his huge heart. In the wake of his passing, I already miss the twinkle in his eye and the warmth and generosity that I felt in his company.

This outpouring of love and respect for Don that so many folks have shared has got me looking at these unique traits that he possessed and, much as a plant breeder would do, I’m thinking about how to select for them in my own life and work. I’m thinking about how to weed this plot and nurture these seedlings that such a good man set in the soil. This is the work I hope we will carry on together.

Whitney Clark, Executive Director, Friends of the Mississippi River

I have many fond memories (and stories) of Don. I am blessed to have known him as friend and colleague. No doubt he leaves behind a long legacy of research, teaching, and innovative accomplishments, but more importantly he will leave a long legacy of building relationships and touching people’s lives for the good. Family was the most important thing to Don, but so too were his students, friends, and colleagues who he richly invested his time and talents into. I will always remember Don as a “people person.” His hard work ethic, research ideas (some good and some whacky), and his off-the-wall humor were inspiring.

I remember a few years back when I cut a fishing trip/vacation short because Don insisted (commanded? I think I heard someone say) that I speak to the Walton Family Foundation folks at UMN about the winter oilseed biz. No regrets…it was all worth it. If Don were standing here today, I could just hear him saying…“Well young man (damn it!), as long as we keep the lands green and waters blue there will always be fish to catch in our Minnesota lakes.”

Don…you will be sorely missed. My condolences to the Wyse family.

Russ Gesch, Agricultural Research Service, Morris

I came to the University of Minnesota as Head of the Department of Horticultural Science in 1990, after 14 years in the Ag Chem industry. Don was familiar with my work in weed science, specifically herbicide mode of action, so we always had a common frame of reference for mutually respectful scientific discussion. In the early 1990s, I chaired a small committee of department heads that recommended Don to be Director of the Center for Sustainable Agriculture, upon which he masterfully built the coalition that became MISA.

As this string of posts illustrates, Don’s influence and personal relationships can better be described by a set of Olympic rings than a Venn diagram.

We all resonate to these posts because Don was the same person to

everybody – friendly, sometimes jovial, but always challenging and truly interested in what the other person thought.

Don understood that the challenges he was seeking to remedy required all areas of knowledge and expertise in plant science, and he recruited both basic and applied scientists into the Forever Green framework.

Don was a disrupter: He challenged the status quo, but always with a positive attitude and a constructive approach to long-term solutions to achieve his broad vision.

Don was a troublemaker, but in the context of the words of the late John Lewis, Don made “Good Trouble.”

Since I came here in 1990, I can think of no other person who has done more to shape the future of Minnesota agriculture than Don Wyse.

Gary M. Gardner, Professor

Emeritus, Department of Horticultural Science, UMN

I am so sorry for your loss, and wish you hope, peace and healing. Can you bear one more story about how he changed a life? I could never have guessed from our first encounter what a strong influence he would have in my life.

It was my first week at the University of Minnesota in 1985 and I was in Robert Jones’ lab with Steve Griffith, working across the bench. Don comes strolling in and immediately starts giving Steve a hard time about his research and studying plant physiology—“the future is in molecular genetics”. He left as abruptly as he entered and I said to Steve—“Who was that, and do I have to take a class from him?!”

Luckily, I did take the graduate Weed Science class from him a couple of years later and came to regard him as a mentor, although he never stopped giving me grief about physiology and plant hormones, especially cytokinins.

Thank you for sharing this very sad news about Don, one of my favorite people ever. My condolences to you and all who worked with and loved him.

Don was an inspiration in his creative, good-natured, disciplined, toughminded and thoughtful research and leadership at the vanguard of food and agriculture systems change. And he was equally an inspiration for me in his careful and wise balance of his family and personal life with his professional. I will always remember his smile and good humor — and toughness when he needed to muster it. Among my favorite conversations with him was about children before I had Orli. He wanted me to be sure and know how precious each moment is with one’s child, how much those passing moments speed up as life goes on, and before you know it, your child has grown up and moved on.

Cynthia Pansing, former staff of the Regional Sustainable Development Partnership

A few years later, I gave a talk about how women had made gains in the agricultural sciences—we were no longer being turned away from graduate programs because woman would “quit to raise families”, but now I felt faced with the challenge of working and wanting to make room for having a family. I noted that there was little opportunity for part-time academic professional work to have a better work-life balance and suggested offering part-time post-doctoral positions—he came to me afterward and said to come see him when I finished. Together with Nancy Ehlke, he hired me as a part-time post-doc for several years. But he was also aware of the potential problem of having a second track career path for women, so also worked to insure that didn’t happen.

I went to work for him at MISA a few years later when I returned from a leave in Europe, when he insisted that sustainable agriculture was where I belonged. It started a whole new chapter in my career, one that has fit me perfectly.

Dear Bev, Dawn, Ryan and families,

Like so many others who worked with and were mentored by your husband and father, I am heartbroken at his sudden absence from our work and lives. And as much as it has affected his work colleagues, we can only imagine how devastating it is to lose your husband, father and grandfather so suddenly and unexpectedly.

I learned so much from him, but I would be lying if I said that when he breezed into the office or sauntered up in the hallway, and said “Got a minute?”, I didn’t freeze, or wonder if I could escape and pretend I didn’t hear. You knew two things; 1) it was not going to be “a minute”, in fact it might be the next five years of your life; 2) you would regret not hearing his new idea, because it very well could be a great one. Helene credited an early MISA Board member with saying, “You just have to understand how it works; Don throws around novel ideas like lit matches—it’s our job as a Board and as staff to decide which ones to stomp out, and which to put wood on.”

I think that’s such an apt description of what it was like to work with him. I am so honored to have been one of the staff to help add fuel to the numerous good ideas that came from that creative mind, leading to MISA, CINRAM, Green Lands Blue Waters, the Regional Sustainable

Partnerships, Forever Green, and many more.

He was such a force, he will be so missed on campus, and I am so sorry for the empty space he leaves in your lives. I hope you all find comfort in the many ways his legacy goes on, through people and the programs, both professionally and personally.

Life is just so hard sometimes. I am holding you all in my heart and mind. Beth Nelson, Director of Research and Education Programs, North Central Sustainable Agriculture and Research Education (SARE)

Don was instrumental changing the way I think of what is possible on my own farming operation, as he did for countless other farmers across the country. His forward thinking, humanity, and wisdom will be missed by all.

Anne Schwagerl, MFU Vice President

I first came into contact with Don while I was an undergrad in Agronomy in 1978. I took Don’s Weed science course, I thought that he was a bit of a hippie at the time, but the course was good. Some 10 years later our paths crossed again, my first supervisor, Dr. Brun, had retired a couple of years earlier and I was sort of a free agent, working with the corn project for a bit, and managing the growth chamber facilities. I was changing lamps in the growth chambers one day and Don stopped by to talk to me. We discussed our situations. Don’s assistant scientist at the time was Joe Spitzmueller who had recently accepted a position with the MDA, so he was looking for a replacement, and he asked me “are you ready to do some science again young man”. I was, and that was how I started working with Don. I asked Spitz about how Don was as a boss and he told me that he had come to regard Don not as a boss but as a good friend.

I had a notion of using the regent’s scholarship program to take grad level courses with the goal of getting into plant breeding. Of course to do this you needed your supervisor’s approval. Don was very supportive and gave me a thesis project investigating herbicide resistance in ryegrass. After that research was completed, I was gratified that Don saw value in my research and we immediately used the findings to develop new ryegrass varieties for Northern MN. Don was good at seeing the next step and then taking it.

Don was always bringing together people that were as enthusiastic about trying new ideas as he was, be they colleagues, farmers, folks in the seed industry, or students. Knowing that for any new idea to take hold he would need buy-in from multiple sectors.

When I started with Don, the name of his project was “Perennial Weed Management”, that was his day job to be sure, but always Don had ideas percolating about how agriculture might evolve into something more

sustainable. I was fortunate to come onboard when he had established himself and had begun to redefine the trajectory of the project toward broader goals. As The Forever Green Initiative picked up momentum he saw his vision becoming reality, he told me that his big regret was that he hadn’t started Forever Green 10 years sooner.

Don’s ideas often led to results as indicated by his list of patents. Even ideas that didn’t pan out (at least not so far), like bacterial weed control, robotic LED lasers for weed control, or domestication of curly dock or cordgrass, still demonstrate his desire to try new things.

When I reflect on my 30 years with Don, it was hard work, yes, but also fun, not just the science but the associations built with all of the great grad students and cooperators that were in Don’s universe. Don was a good man and surrounded himself with good people and I am blessed to have been part of it. As many of you had mentioned, he often referred to guys as “young man”, so true, he was still addressing me as “young man” as recently as last month. Even though that is no longer true, when I think of him I can still hear these words.

Kevin Betts, Researcher, Wyse Lab, Agronomy & Plant Genetics, UMN

I took Dr. Wyse’s AGRO 4505 Biology, Ecology, and Management of Invasive Plants course in my first semester as a graduate student. At the start of each class period, Dr. Wyse would unload stacks of printed articles across the tables at the front of the classroom. I don’t recall discussing the papers in class, but their content absolutely appeared on the three 20-page written exams that semester and the oral final. I still recall the scenario that Dr. Wyse posed to me in my oral exam, about edge effects in a Moroccan field experiment caused by dust being lifted by traffic on the road and landing on the plants that bordered it. The exercises were not only memorable, but his lessons were also instructive of self-directed learning, thoroughness, and clarity of thought. The ingredients of what is needed to understand problems, possible solutions, and how to convey them effectively.

Last year in August I returned to the Agronomy and Plant Genetics department, just in time to volunteer at the Forever Green Initiative booth at the State Fair. I hadn’t seen Dr. Wyse since starting my new role in the department and was excited to see him and catch up on FGI. I commented to him that he signed up for just about every shift at the booth, and he said something like, “Yeah, well that’s what you do if you’re the director!” I am saddened that this year I won’t see Don’s name on the signup for the shifts during all twelve days of the Fair. In the spirit of the call to action to move Dr. Wyse’s legacy forward, I want to invite all who are able to help fill the shifts at the Forever Green Initiative booth this year. Dr. Wyse’s passing leaves gaping holes in so many ways. My deepest

sympathies to his family, friends, colleagues, and all who are feeling his sudden loss.

May Dr. Wyse rest in peace and may his legacy live on.

Hannah Rusch, Researcher, Agronomy & Plant Genetics, UMN

I have known Don since he invited me to interview for the MISA coordinator position in 1993. Consequently I have many “Wyse stories” but I will share just one, from the last week of June 2024. Don came into my office and said: Let’s Go! Where, I asked, and he said a Forever Green Tour. I asked him who we would be showing the plots to and his reply was: the office staff. Brilliant! I said. And we talked about how important their work is to the Forever Green Initiative and how much we appreciate all that they do. We rounded up staff from the Departments of Agronomy & Plant Genetics, Plant Pathology, and Soil, Water and Climate and headed out to the field, where spent almost 3 hours touring the fields, talking about research, looking at perennial and continuous living cover crops. We talked about plant breeding, crop management, the new ornamental flax plants that will be available for homeowners in the next few years and commercialization efforts for all of these crops. It was a great afternoon!

Helene Murray, MISA Executive Director

One evening last August, that would be August 2023. I went to the State Fair to volunteer in the Forever Green’s booth, to take over Don’s shift. Once I got there, as usual, Don began to ask me how things were going. And I told him that we were packaging seed for the fall planting. And we were hand picking the yellow seed pennycress from the mixture of yellow & black seed. And it was a very slow process & bit frustrating as pennycress seed is small.

Then, he told me that his wife, Bev, was selecting the yellow seed from the mixture of yellow and black at home too, in their basement, actually, she was sorting seed at this moment. And he just received a message from Bev, and she discovered that the yellow seed was round!! He explained that Bev put the seed on a sheet, and she shook the sheet, then the yellow seed started to roll!!! And black seeds were flatter & stayed behind. And he showed me the picture that Bev was sending him. And Don began to tell me how smart and great Bev was. I always remember the big smile, the sparkle in his eyes when he was talking about his beloved wife Bev.

Then he began to discuss with me how we can make improvements to pennycress breeding by integrating the shape of the seed in addition to the seed color….

I only worked with Don for a bit over two years. He gave his full support to me to build the pennycress breeding program and integrate into the FGI and the department. I am forever grateful and honored to be brought to the web of his network. I miss you, Don. There have been moments when I wish that I could talk to him or see him in meetings. One phrase Don kept telling me is “You don’t think I know?” Don, I wish you knew how much we miss you.

My condolences to Wyse family.

Julia X Zhang, Researcher, Agronomy & Plant Genetics, UMN

Unfortunately I was unable to make it to Don’s Celebration of Life today due to my own family’s unforeseen events, and I feel like I missed my chance to pay homage, so I’m leaving some sentiments here. I’d bet it was a heartfelt event full of love and compassion for a person who was so full of those things for the earth, plants, and especially for people. He actually reminded me of my late father - ponytail, sandals, and sarcasm included!

Don had a large part in my graduate program being a reality. He, Kevin Betts, and Neil Anderson started the perennial flax breeding program several years ago (Don for oilseed and fiber, Neil for cut flower and garden bedding plant), and were all on the MDA grant which funded my cut flower flax research the past few years. Shortly after I was hired, Don made sure to send me an email invite for the weekly Friday FGI meetings,

since I was now ‘part of the perennial crop club’. I appreciated the inclusion, and was quite excited to be learning about multi-use perennial species for regenerative and restorative agroecological systems.

I always appreciated the jovial, wry-witted pragmatism he brought to a situation, and how he approached problem-solving from a novel perspective. I wanted to learn more from him, and had asked him to be on my committee, but we just never made time for that coffee at Mim’s. I understood that he had bigger fish to fry over at the Capitol, helping to secure millions in funding for FGI, among other work. I wanted to talk to him more about all of the systems at play, and learn what he’s learned about land management. I admired his drive, perseverance, and positive approach to life’s challenges, and will try to remember that when facing tough problems in the future. I wish I could’ve taken his weed class, but he was too busy saving the world!

I have two very ‘Don’ memories I’ll share:

First, sometime last fall he and I were both walking in the Borlaug Hall main area near the plants, making small talk while waiting for students to file into the lecture hall. I figure he’s on the way to a meeting, seminar, etc. I ask “Hey Don, how is it going?” I look down and he’s got a huge water tank, a sprayer in his hand, and a huge smile on his face - he was watering the plants! He says “I’m doing well!” I asked “Isn’t there someone else who can do that for you?” He says “Well sure, but I enjoy it - it’s meditative.” Yes, it sure is.

Second, last summer Jess and I arrived for our weekly data and hoeing in my St. Paul flax field, and there stands Don, talking to a man near his age (previous grad student turned scientist) about the weeds in the field. Curly dock, specifically. I enjoyed the opportunity to introduce Jess to this character, ‘Don Wyse’, and I just waited for him to launch into a story. He looks at us, points to the tall weed and asks “Do you know what that is?” The details of his research story escape me, but Don ended with “This weed is here because of me - this was my fault!” It was partially sarcastic, but it was clear he was still thinking about the problem of controlling that weed. He never gave up, and always worked the problem!

Let’s carry his perseverance, positivity, lightheartedness, compassion, and creativity forward while honoring his legacy to keep the lands green and the waters blue.

Elizabeth A. Goodman (Liz), Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Horticultural Science, UMN

Here are some final musings for Don:

Here I am paying tribute to Don Wyse

Dons contributions could fill the skies

He found solutions that came to be prized

Making the world better with minimal sacrifice

The key was green and making the lands forever is what he advised

Finding new crops perhaps came as a surprise

But with new plants on the land his seasonal brown spots said goodbye

While providing us with food and fuel and other supplies

And more funds for farmers kept them on his side

All that he did is considered by all to be wise.

M. David Marks, Adjunct Professor, Agronomy & Plant Genetics, UMN

George Boody reflections on Don Wyse, a brilliantly effective man, scientist, and leader.

To Don’s family, Bev, Dawn, Ryan, and their families, I extend my heartfelt condolences.

I also want to pass along remembrances about how I came to know and so appreciate Don.

As I got to know Don, it was clear that he was an energizing, accomplished, and kindred spirit. He recognized that science could be employed in support of small-to-mid-sized farmers who strived to diversify their farms, but that the products from these evergreen, diversified farmscapes had to connect with viable markets. He knew from experience it would take a community effort to achieve fruition.

I was impressed that Don managed research, publishing, and teaching alongside organizing within academia, as well as an “inside-outside” organizing strategy in concert with community-based organizations like LSP, groups of farmers wanting new living cover and marketable crops, companies, and legislators. He hired capable people, including Helene Murray as Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture (MISA) coordinator (now executive director) and Mitch Hunter as associate director of Forever Green. He influenced faculty and countless graduate students and gathered them around his vision to work toward a common goal. MISA has been the foundation from which Don and others helped build the Sustainable Regional Development Partnerships, Green Lands Blue Waters, the Forever Green Initiative, and much more. MISA is one of the few such Institutes formed at that time in universities around the country that continue, and still make a difference.

His broad vision based on an understanding of the resilience that results from diversity on the landscape and in human communities became apparent to me

as I first got to know him. Don considered whether to assume the directorship of MISA just after its formation in 1992. One of his first negotiations with the Dean of the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences was to state that he would not take on the directorship without significant seed funds for projects being allocated by the Dean for at least five years to fund interdisciplinary projects focused on sustainable agriculture. He won the money, which proved pivotal for my work as Executive Director and scientist for Land Stewardship Project (LSP) and well beyond.

LSP applied for and was chosen for two MISA seed projects around 1994. We had found the Holistic Management decision making system to be an effective way for farmers to consider crop diversification and integrated crop and livestock systems such as managed rotational grazing (pursuing his idea of evergreen farmscapes). We further thought a scientific and community-based evaluation would he helpful and won MISA seed funding for that project in 1994. That Monitoring Project interdisciplinary effort, which I led for LSP, kept evolving into other projects that later influenced National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program funding strategies, groundbreaking federal legislation then called the Conservation Stewardship Initiative in 2001, and countless farmers. Threads from the

Monitoring Project continue today, some of which I am still involved in.

It is gratifying to me that the results from the follow-up efforts related to the Monitoring Project later helped Don and others lay the early groundwork for national funding applications for what has since become Forever Green Initiative. LSP has gladly helped raise money for the Initiative from the Minnesota Legislature.

Another example of Don’s vision and long-lasting influence was MISA seed funding for LSP and University Extension to start what has become the Farm Beginnings Program. It has led to countless beginning farmers starting, the development of like-minded programs across the country, and tens of millions of dollars of funding for this kind of organizing across the country through the Farm Bill and USDA.

Don brought his humor, sharp eye for the next step, rigor, pointed feedback at times, limitless energy, and effective strategizing to his science and visionary projects. His legacy lives on and I will miss him.

With gratitude for Don in my life,

George Boody

Tributes that Appeared in News Releases

Dr. Don Wyse, a pillar of the sustainable agriculture movement and a true friend of the Mississippi River, passed away unexpectedly on July 2. His death leaves a significant hole in our community, but he also leaves behind a vision for a better world that will inspire us for years to come.

Over a career that spanned more than five decades — first as a pioneering plant scientist and University of Minnesota faculty member, later as a larger-than-life evangelist for the movement — Don marshaled his seemingly boundless energy, intelligence and wit to map a path toward a more just and prosperous farm economy.

Along the way he founded or co-founded a vital network of institutions including the Forever Green Initiative, the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, and the Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships. He also supported a veritable army of mentees, students and devoted colleagues.

Don’s ideas are at the core of FMR’s approach to agricultural ecosystems, where we strive to advance continuous living cover cropping systems that allow conservation and rural resilience to thrive side-by-side. In service of these goals, FMR worked alongside Don and his university colleagues to launch the Forever Green Partnership in 2020, but our relationship began well before then. That’s the way things went with Don: His imagination and clarity of purpose roped you in, and before you knew it you had made his vision your own; signing on the dotted line was just a formality.

Our longtime friend and Forever Green Co-Director Nick Jordan said it well in an interview with MPR News after Don’s death: “There is a whole river of effort, so to speak, that is flowing strongly … And ultimately, our expression of gratitude and respect and love for Don is to continue to support and nourish that network of people.”

All who met Don — whether at a field tour or a legislative hearing, over a draft Kernza beer or five coffees-deep at a strategy meeting — felt that here was a person with big, pragmatic ideas and the force of will to accomplish them.

He gave us a job to do. We plan to see it done.

Friends of the Mississippi River Staff

Don Wyse’s Land Grant Legacy

It’s Imperative Forever Green Stays True to its Foundations: Farmer-

Centered, Accountable to the Public, Rooted in the Land

Back in 1998, I was working on an article for the Land Stewardship Letter about how the lack of biodiversity in agriculture was threatening the agronomic, ecological, and economic future of Midwestern farming communities. One of the people I interviewed was Don Wyse, a respected University of Minnesota plant scientist who had recently helped coordinate a task force that had concluded recent crop failures in the Red River Valley were a prime indicator that technological fixes were no replacement for biological and genetic diversity. It was clear that Dr. Wyse, despite his background researching the ecology of weeds, got the big picture. In fact, I think he’s one of the first agricultural scientists I ever interviewed who talked about the role “resilience” should play in the future of farming

“It isn’t just an environmental tragedy that’s developing,” he said while we sat in the offices of the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture (MISA) on the U of M’s Saint Paul campus. The tragedy he was referring to was how monocultural production had caused major crop disease outbreaks in the Red River Valley, threatening the viability of raising small grains such as wheat. “It’s also an economic, family, quality of life thing as well,” he added. “The resilience is being lost in terms of the environment, but it’s also being lost in terms of people. It’s fragile all the way through.”

When Don died July 2 as a result of injuries from a fall, we didn’t just lose an incredibly innovative agricultural scientist — we lost someone who was a standard-bearer for what the land grant mission is all about: using science to serve the land, communities, and, most importantly, people. And he didn’t just give lip service to that mission.

Don’s contributions to plant science during his five decades at the U of M — from his early days doing ryegrass research to recent breakthroughs in the areas of developing crops that could provide the land in corn and soybean regions with “continuous living cover,” are impressive, and would be enough to label a typical academic career “successful.” In fact, if you know anything about Dr. Wyse, it’s probably in relation to the development of Kernza, an intermediate wheatgrass that is now considered the world’s first commercially viable perennial grain. (Minnesota is now one of the top Kernza-producing states, with 17 growers raising 653 acres of the grain. Obviously, this crop is nowhere close to competing with corn and soybeans when it comes to dominance of the landscape, but it’s a start.)

But his true legacy was contributing to a regenerative farming research and outreach infrastructure within a giant institution that hasn’t always been friendly to agricultural systems that don’t fit into the corn-bean-feedlot

sense for farmers to raise them.

“The issue is how to make these systems adaptable by farmers,” Don said on LSP’s podcast. “If you want to change the landscape, give farmers an economic opportunity to change the landscape.”

That’s why Forever Green not only focuses on developing innovative crops and cropping systems, but also the commercialization, adoption, and scaling of continuous living cover crops in the region.

First & Last: The Farmer

Don knew that speaking to the media was key to garnering public support for getting more diversity on the land. As a result, he received a lot of attention personally for his work, including being featured in the New York Times‘ “Visionaries” series in 2022. But he was the first to say that work with continuous living cover crops and initiatives like Forever Green went beyond the accomplishments of one individual. In fact, over the years he repeatedly argued that one key investment the U of M (and the public) needed to make was in graduate student programs that would train the next generation of regenerative ag scientists.

Don was visibly proud when eight grad students sat down with me in 2015 to talk about the research they were doing as a result of Forever Green and why it mattered. They excitedly shared their work with pennycress, kura clover, camelina, hairy vetch, and various other crops and cropping systems. In this room was the future of regenerative farming research.

“I was an environmental studies major as an undergrad and I remember learning repeatedly about the problems, but there was never any discussion about the solutions,” Kayla Altendorf said at the time. “That’s why I feel so grateful and so empowered to learn the skills that could allow me to actually do something about these problems.”

Dr. Altendorf has since gone on to do forage and cereal grains research for the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service.

Through it all, Don emphasized the benefits that could come from working across disciplines to solve the problems associated with monocultural agriculture. He saw Forever Green as a way for not only plant scientists to make a contribution, but researchers from various backgrounds, including agronomy, ecology, soil science, economics, marketing, and processing. The private sector plays a role as well — after all, it’s the food industry that will eventually get a product like Kernza onto the supper tables of eaters on a widespread basis.

And, most critically, Don recognized that farmers have to be key players in that partnership. Perhaps the most fruitful farmer partnership Dr. Wyse and other Forever Green researchers cultivated has been with Carmen Fernholz, a southwestern Minnesota organic farmer who was a pioneering

producer of Kernza and who regularly hosts field days on the crop.

I’ve interviewed a lot of land grant scientists over the years, and frankly, it’s clear that some are so wrapped up in the intricacies of the science itself — the genetics, the biology, the chemistry — that they lose sight of the big picture role they should be playing in helping farmers become more successful, sustainable, and resilient. I always got the sense from Don that he had never forgotten that he was a public servant serving a constituent — the farmer — that was striving to fulfill many roles: food producer, land steward, economic engine of a community. Perhaps it was an attitude he retained from growing up on a farm in Ohio.

What’s exciting about farmers like Carmen Fernholz playing such key roles in cutting edge research like this is that it has prompted researchers to fine-tune the genomics, as well as planting and harvesting techniques, in a way that is agronomically practical, and not just “gee-whiz cool” from a purely scientific point of view. Perhaps the best example of that is how farmers have been working with researchers to tweak Kernza plantings so that they blend in with livestock grazing enterprises, adding yet one more level of efficiency.

“To make a farmer feel like the work I was doing every day out in the field was equally as important as the work going on at a premier land grant university became the substance of our bonding,” Carmen told Minnesota Public Radio recently while recalling his relationship with Don. “We could challenge each other yet hold the deepest respect for each other’s expertise and life experiences.”

It’s particularly difficult to lose Dr. Don Wyse at a time when Midwestern farming is being rocked by the extreme weather accompanying climate change, and the negative repercussions of monocultural cropping are showing up in our groundwater in the form of nitrate pollution. In addition, agriculture’s vulnerability as a result of a hyper-focus on producing a handful of crops and removing animals from the land and crowding them into mega-sized CAFOs is becoming increasingly clear.

The good news is Don set in motion a mechanism of regenerative research and outreach that can extend beyond one individual scientist’s lifespan. But such a legacy won’t survive and thrive by accident — there are many forces at work that would prefer that a different form of agriculture dominates our public institutions and society in general. Now, more than ever, the public needs to step up and support agroecological systems based on Dr. Wyse’s vision of building resiliency — on the land and our farms, as well as on Main Street.

Brian DeVore, Managing Editor, Land Stewardship Project

Dr. Don Wyse: a dynamic force

It is with deep sadness that I share with all of you the sudden passing of University of Minnesota professor, Dr. Don Wyse, on July 2, 2024.

Dr. Wyse was a dynamic force for clean water, healthy soil, sustainable agriculture and a fierce champion for rural communities. Wyse was pivotal in the formation of a family of sustainability-focused organizations that SFA interacts with regularly, including Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture (MISA), Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships (RSDP), Green Lands Blue Waters, Center for Integrated Natural Resource Management (CINRAM) and the Forever Green Initiative. You can watch and listen to Wyse explain the vision for these organizations in this video that was created when he was recognized with the highest distinction the University awards faculty members, the Outstanding Community Service Award.

Dr. Wyse was known for his keen intellect, ever-present sense of humor, his use of the occasional “damn” or “hell” in a meeting and his passion for people, the land and justice. He was shaped by his farm upbringing in Ohio; his research on weeds, water and the environment; his fifty years of teaching at the University of Minnesota and, most importantly, his family. It was rare that he didn’t mention at least one of these topics (or use one of those curse words) in a conversation.

During my tenure as chair of the State SFA board, I was also working shoulder-to-shoulder with Don, leading efforts to commercialize the new crops and cropping systems in development through the Forever Green Initiative. I had the honor of witnessing (and learning from) his unremitting drive to do everything in his power to foster healthy lives, soil and communities. This 2019 Forever Green presentation is one he gave hundreds of times and is the vision he was working on to the very day he passed.

Although his loss is tremendous, Don was also adamant that the work required “all hands on deck.” I believe his most important skill was his ability to connect with people from all walks of life, tell them the story of his work and make them champions for sustainability in their corners of the world. I am one of them.

Don was close friends and research partner with my Dad, Carmen Fernholz.

Connie Fernholz Carlson, Crow River Chapter member; former SFA Board member and President

From MISA’s Facebook Page July 2, 2024:

The Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Green Lands Blue Waters staff grieve the death of our friend and mentor, Dr. Donald Wyse. We could use many other words to describe Don, and we have, in the hours surrounding his passing: inspiration, goad, force of nature, pain in the ass, funny, kind, challenging, beloved and admired. He saw everyone, welcomed everyone, shared his vision of agriculture relentlessly, and relentlessly invited people to sign on. And made you believe that signing on to the vision was the most important thing you could do –and then you found that in fact, it was. He built a host of generations of committed University faculty, students, staff; and farmers and community members who caught his fire and carry it with them. Truly, we stand on the shoulders of a giant. Thank you, Don, and rest in power. We’ve got this.

Comments on MISA’s post after Don died:

So true. Every last word. I still recall picking Don Wyse up at a small airport in Northern Minnesota in 2004. I had invited him to give the keynote at that year’s Minnesota Society of Conservation Biologists annual meeting. It was my first time seriously entering Don’s orbit.

Who was this guy who was getting dropped off at a small airport? Where was he coming from?

Such intrigue and mystery.

True to Don, he gave a provocative, smart and impassioned argument for why conservationists should care about agriculture. And vice versa.

After the conference talk, I drove Don and I home — we began talking as soon as the car doors shut. I felt like I had met one of the most consequential people in my life. And I had.

For the next three or so hours neither one of us would or could shut up. We talked about agriculture, farmers, corporations, greed, science, markets, plants, genes, continuous living cover, how it’s all connected, on the need for authenticity. We talked about his career arc, his dreams. And he listened also to mine. From then on we kept connected through our passion to fix the system, to call out bullshit, to inspire by doing.

We would talk lots since that car ride. On how whatever job I was doing could be leveraged for promoting a new vision for agriculture.

We shared perspectives on the levers of change and our experiences on trying to pull them.

I love Don as a citizen of Earth. For his authenticity and the education he gave me about the possibilities for agriculture and culture.

Rest easy, my Captain.

Derric Pennington, Dept. of Applied Economics, UMN

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This is such a lovely, and spot on tribute. Don was my friend and mentor. He was critical in launching my career, by listening to my interests, being willing to back my ideas, and putting his reputation behind an idealistic young woman. That was nearly 30 years ago.

Jan Joannides, Renewing the Countryside Director

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Today we lost a tireless advocate and organizer for agricultural sustainability who also happened to be a top notch scientist. And a consummate joker, always ready laugh and find humor even in the midst of the most difficult work. I met him right after I finished my PhD, and he became not only one of the best and most important mentors I’ve ever had in my life, but also a treasured friend. I will miss him dearly. We will carry on the work he spent so many decades supporting and leading. But we will miss his laugh, his wisdom, his encouragement, and his infectious enthusiasm, every day.

Scott Peters, faculty, Cornell University

Minnesota Environmental Partnership

Posted July 15th, 2024

Remembering Don Wyse, Green Revolution 2.0’s champion

It’s with a heavy heart that I write about the passing of University of Minnesota Agronomy Professor Don Wyse. Don died on July 2nd, after suffering major injuries in a fall. I ask all to join me in remembering Don and sharing sympathies with his family.

Quite simply, Don was a giant in reshaping both the ever important and powerful agricultural as well as the University of Minnesota systems. I had the honor of working closely with Don for about the last 30 years. And just as he did for so many people, this weed scientist changed how I viewed both of those systems and how I worked to change the world for the better.

The vision that Don pursued for the next generation of agriculture is nothing less than the Green Revolution 2.0. – taking the work of the University’s Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug to a higher level.

Moving beyond the industrial agricultural model focused on optimizing production of corn and soybeans, Don led the conceptualization and development of agricultural cropping systems that much more closely mimic those critical natural ecological systems on which we all depend. He did this with “continuous living cover” crops, which, unlike conventional row crops, keep the soil covered with vigorous, growing plants throughout the growing season.

This approach is designed to result in superior ecological benefits like clean water, healthier soil, improved habitat and climate resiliency. It also provides the ever-important benefit of marketable crops that create the income to make these systems durable and appealing to farmers.

In recent years, this work was done under the auspices of Forever Green,

the University of Minnesota initiative for which Don was the co-founder and co-director. You may know of some of the initial releases from this work, such as Kernza, the world’s first viable perennial grain crop, now in grocery stores and increasingly used in beer and prepared foods. Another major regenerative crop starting to roll out is Winter Camelina, which produces a valuable oil with strong potential for replacing fossil fuels in transportation.

For more than a decade, MEP and our allies have worked with lead member organizations Land Stewardship Project and Friends of the Mississippi River, to gain support and funding for Forever Green, securing over $22 million in state funds to support this critical work.

But Don’s vision was bigger than just developing new crops. He also helped lead the development of new and innovative ways to bring people together and bring community voices into decision making spaces.

I first met Don while I was serving as Chair of the Environment and Agriculture Funding Division in the Minnesota Senate. I was skeptical of the direction of much of the University of Minnesota’s agricultural research and questioned how it benefited the greater good, wondering what had happened to its Land Grant mission. In Don, I found a kindred spirit who shared these concerns but who was also rolling out models for how to integrate diverse community voices into the University decision making process.

We first collaborated on funding for the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, which brought farmers and advocates together with the University to support sustainable agriculture. Multiple MEP member organizations are currently actively engaged with this Institute.

We then partnered to launch the next iteration of Don’s vision, the Regional Sustainable Development Partnership, with regional communitybased boards located across the state, linking University programs with community priorities to support sustainability. This was followed by the development of the Green Lands, Blue Waters project which linked Land Grant Universities along the main stem of the Mississippi River with NGOs to develop and support a transition to continuous living cover agricultural systems. All of this was before the launch of the more Minnesota focused Forever Green Initiative.

Forever Green is proving to be transformational, not only for its promising new cropping systems, but also for its way of operating. In order to drive the array of changes needed, Don understood that we couldn’t just keep doing what has always been done. He created novel space and capacity within the University to develop teams and pursue big picture ideas that served the greater public good. And he continuously reached out and engaged new partners, educating them, and learning from them, as he went.

Don thrived on a steady stream of engagement whether it be farmers, community people and processors to corporate institutions, elected leaders, agency staff, funders, a wide range of NGOs, other researchers and academics. This is the “secret sauce” that distinguishes so much of Don’s work. He wasn’t satisfied with just developing new plant materials. He formed the networks and partnerships to not only support work on a wide range of “Continuous Living Cover” crops, but also set up systems to support the commercialization of these crops from farm field to kitchen table or whatever the end use may be.

Don created new models for the future of regenerative agriculture and our Land Grant University – something critically needed by both systems. Our challenge will be to lift up this work, and see that it not only continues, but ramps up, to meet the pressing needs of today for the protection of our soil, water, and habitat and the prosperity of our farmers and communities.

Within the last few days, the Star Tribune ran two wonderful articles related to Don. The first was a profile of his life and work, and on the front page two days later, an article about Winter Camelina, one of the most promising crops springing from Forever Green. Together, they say a lot about Don and the Green Revolution 2.0.

A Celebration of Life for Don Wyse will be held at the UMN McNamara Alumni Center on July 26th at 2 pm, followed by a reception. All who knew, worked with and appreciated Don are welcome to attend. Memorials are being accepted for a scholarship fund in Don’s name: https://everloved.com/life-of/dr-donald-wyse/donate/

Steve Morse, Minnesota Environmental Partnership

Rep. Samantha Vang, Rep. Leon Lillie, Forever Green Co-Director Don Wyse, Rep. Ginny Klevorn and Steve Morse at a Forever Green field tour

Minnesota Invasive Terrestrial Plants and Pests Center

July 2024 newsletter

Remembering Don Wyse

Don Wyse, faculty member in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics and co-director of the Forever Green Initiative. Credit: David L. Hansen

Legendary Professor Don Wyse passed away on July 2, 2024, at the age of 77 after sustaining injuries from a fall. Don was a visionary for sustainable agriculture, reflected in part through his leadership of the Forever Green Initiative. However, we from MITPPC want to acknowledge the important role Don played in the early days of the Center.

In September 2016, the weed Palmer amaranth, Amaranthus palmeri, was found in Minnesota for the first time. It causes major losses in row crops if unmanaged and can be resistant to common herbicides. After the finds, Minnesota Department of Agriculture expressed the need for more research, specifically for a reliable genetic test to identify the tiny seeds of Palmer amaranth that might be contaminants of seed mixes that were arriving in the state.

When presented with this challenge, Don quickly agreed to take it on, confident that he could assemble the right team. Don immediately identified Todd Gaines, associate professor of molecular weed science at Colorado State, who would prove to be instrumental. Don also quickly recruited Anthony Brusa to work as a postdoc on the project. Other colleagues from Michigan State and USDA were brought on board.

The team was incredibly successful and developed a tool that is more than 99.7% accurate for Palmer amaranth, better than any other test (see Brusa et al. 2021). During the project, the team provided compelling genetic evidence that some accessions of Amaranth seeds in a national collection were misidentified. Don smirked at the revelation but seemed unsurprised.

We had spirited discussions with Don about the future of this research and prospects for keeping Palmer amaranth out of Minnesota indefinitely. Through those conversations, Don’s dedication to his team was abundantly clear. We will miss Don’s boldness and quick wit. He taught us all many lessons.

MinnPost Opinion – Community Voices

Late U of M scholar’s regenerative agriculture vision for Minnesota must continue

Don Wyse, who died earlier this month, used science to serve farmers, local communities and the general public.

by

Sophia Murphy, Scott Elkins and Steve Morse July 30, 2024

As Minnesota’s sustainable farming and environmental community grieves the passing of a giant in the movement, the critical need for public investment in an agricultural system that builds resilient farms, landscapes and communities is clearer than ever.

When Don Wyse, Ph.D. and co-director/founder of the nationally-known Forever Green Initiative at the University of Minnesota, passed away earlier this month, we didn’t just lose an innovative plant breeder; we lost someone who was using science to serve farmers, natural resources, rural communities and the greater good. Wyse was the epitome of the landgrant mission in action: public science serving the public good.

He left behind a 50-year legacy of research that is benefiting people and the land. For example, through Forever Green, Wyse drove the development of “continuous living cover” crops that build soil and habitat, protect our water, sequester carbon and generate economic activity 365 days a year. In all, 16 crops — from Kernza to camelina — are under development through the Forever Green Initiative.

But Wyse understood there’s a reason our system is dominated by a duoculture of corn and soybeans: our agronomic, marketing, transportation and processing systems, along with public policy, drive this narrow focus. Indeed, it was public investment via the land-grant system that helped make such crops so dominant. Now we need public investment to create the next generation of crops. Forever Green isn’t just a “crops incubator” — it’s also working to drive a new food system that delivers multiple benefits to society.

Wyse’s greatest legacy is his ability to harness the resources of the U of M — our land-grant university — to address critical public needs for agriculture that are beyond the ongoing efforts to further entrench the dominant industrial model. As we increasingly understand the limits and liabilities of the industrial ag system, science that responds to and is accountable to farmers, local communities and the general public is critical.

Wyse recognized that if we are to bring about significant, but practical, changes to Midwestern agriculture, farmers must be key players in research and outreach partnerships. Carmen Fernholz, a southwestern Minnesota farmer and a pioneering Kernza producer, is a living example of how fruitful such partnerships can be.

“This relationship with Don showed me that the fields on a farm were really no different than plots on the St. Paul campus,” the farmer said

recently when reflecting on working with the scientist. “Most of these Forever Green crops have the potential to not only provide a more robust food system but also benefit the land, our water and the human resource, namely farmers.”

Such teamwork has set in motion the creation of a network of regenerative research and outreach that extends beyond one individual scientist’s lifespan. But this legacy won’t survive and thrive by accident; we need to be intentional and double down on the work to create regenerative continuous living cover systems that protect our environment and are profitable for farmers. This won’t be easy. There is incredible inertia pushing for a bigger reliance on the monocultural cropping systems that dominate. But Wyse has shown us it can be done.

The timing is critical: farming is being rocked by the extreme weather accompanying climate change, and the negative repercussions of undermining our soil’s health are showing up in the form of water pollution across our state. Conventional agriculture’s focus on producing a handful of crops and removing animals from the land and crowding them into giant confined facilities creates vulnerabilities that we can’t ignore.

That’s why it’s so important that Forever Green continue, be built out and directed in a way that is accountable and beneficial, especially to the emerging, small and medium-sized farmers who are the bedrock of our land and rural communities.

Minnesota’s sustainable agriculture and environmental community calls on public institutions to step up and expand support for agroecological systems to fulfill Don Wyse’s vision of building resiliency — on the land, on our farms, and on Main Street.

Sophia Murphy is with the Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy; Scott Elkins is with the Land Stewardship Project and Steve Morse is with the Minnesota Environmental Partnership.

Jan Joannides of Renewing the Countryside, Lucinda Winter of the Sustainable Farming Association and Theresa Keaveny of Climate Land Leaders also contributed to this article.

crops into the world. He spent decades bringing together and fostering a large community of scientists, researchers, farmers, entrepreneurs, and advocates to reimagine agriculture. He was a true pioneer and visionary who creatively navigated the diverse spheres of work necessary to move this big project forward, pulling in young researchers, government agencies, politicians, farmers, and more. He had the gregarious spirit needed to lead a coalition pursuing a big, hairy, audacious goal. Don’s advice that sticks with me was his refrain to “tell the damn story.” From selling Kernza to supporting grad students, the stories that inspire and retain us are the key to this work. Don generously subscribed to two full Perennial Shares each month, giving the vast majority of food away to his network to champion continuous living cover crops and the movement to grow them.

Nick Jordan, Don’s fellow co-founder and co-director of Forever Green, wrote eloquently after Don’s passing: “There is a whole river of effort, so to speak, that is flowing strongly, and we are very confident that this work has what it needs to go forward. Ultimately, our expression of gratitude and respect and love for Don is to continue to support and nourish that network of people. His legacy is that network of people.” “

Christopher Abbott and the Perennial Pantry team

Perennial Share monthly newsletter, August, 2024

In Memory of Don Wyse,

Don Wyse, the co-founder and co-director of the Forever Green Initiative at the University of Minnesota, passed away last month. Don is one of the giants whose shoulders we stand on in bringing perennial

Minnesota Crop Improvent Association Fall 2024

Donald Wyse:

A 46-Year Career Working in Collaboration with MCIA and the Grass Seed Industry in the Roseau and Lake of the Woods Region

In remembrance of Professor Donald Wyse, a great friend of MCIA who died July 2, 2024, we present here remarks he shared upon receiving MCIA’s highest honor, the Achievement in Crop Improvement Award, in January 2021.

A 46-Year Career Working in Collaboration with MCIA and the Grass Seed Industry in the Roseau and Lake of the Woods Region

By

Donald Wyse (1947–2024), Professor, Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, University of Minnesota

My wife, Beverly, and I, along with our two children Dawn (5 years) and Ryan (3 weeks), moved from East Lansing, Michigan, to St. Paul in June 1974, to start my career as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. I had just completed my Ph.D. program in weed science and plant/herbicide biochemistry at Michigan State University. I had recently

agreed to accept a weed science research and teaching position in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics that had been lobbied for by MCIA and the northern Minnesota grass seed industry. The research focus of my new position was selected to be perennial weed management across all of Minnesota’s agricultural systems. The primary research focus of the position was intended to be on two perennial weeds, quackgrass and Canada thistle, which were of great concern at that time to farmers across the state of Minnesota, and especially important to the grass and legume seed producers in [the] Roseau and Lake of the Woods region of northern Minnesota.

After early discussions with MCIA personnel, and the grass seed producers, my research program soon became focused on the development and implementation of quackgrass management systems to support the production of certified quackgrass-free seed of turf and forage grass species. When I started my career, quackgrass was endemic throughout Minnesota, and was the primary deterrent to the production of high-quality grass seed of turf (Kentucky bluegrass) and forage (timothy) species that were under production in the region at that time. Quackgrass was also prohibiting the expansion of grass seed production to new turf species, like perennial ryegrass. Quackgrass reduced the seed yield of the turf and forage grasses, but the primary impact was on seed quality, because it was difficult to remove quackgrass seed and seed parts from the harvested Kentucky bluegrass and perennial ryegrass seed during the combining and seed cleaning process. Grass seed that could not be certified to be free of quackgrass could not be sold for sowing purposes, which was a very costly potential economic loss to grass seed producers, [if] their seed was rejected. This is where my interaction with MCIA started, in a collaborative working relationship, along with the grass seed producers and seed processors in Roseau and Lake of the Woods counties.

My early interaction with MCIA was through discussions with Ward Marshall, who was the Manager of MCIA when I arrived in my new position, and then Harley Otto, soon thereafter. My primary MCIA contact became Ray Derry, who lived in Roseau at the time I initiated my research program. He became one of my primary mentors in the early days of my career, as I learned about the grass seed industry and the associated weed seed contamination issues facing the grass seed industry. Over the years, I had the privilege of continuing my relationship with MCIA personnel through my interaction with Gary Beil, Ben Lang, Fawad Shah, Roger Wippler, Cindy Wippler, and Kris Folland. I soon learned that there was a great working relationship between the grass seed producers, seed processors, MCIA, and the University of Minnesota, all designed to produce high-quality, certified grass seed for the global market.

When I started my research, the primary seed processors in the Roseau, and Lake of the Woods region were Marvin Seed, Northrup King, Northern Farm and Garden, and Habstritt Farms. Over the years, these companies evolved and today the seed processing and marketing

leadership for the grass seed industry is provided by Northern Excellence, Habstritt Seed Co., and NorFarm Seeds. These organizations, in partnership with the seed producers, MCIA, and University of Minnesota researchers, have developed coordinated grass seed production and seed processing systems that dramatically reduced quackgrass contamination in producer fields. The low level of quackgrass seed remaining in the harvested grass seed has been eliminated through the development of ingenious seed processing systems that rely on the art, science, and technology developed by the seed processing industry in the region, resulting in the reliable production of high-quality, certified quackgrassfree grass seed from the Roseau and Lake of the Woods region of Minnesota.

My relationship with MCIA was also facilitated through my interaction with many of the grass seed producers, seed processors, and associated industries that have worked in a close partnership with MCIA, and in some cases played leadership roles in the MCIA organization over the years. This included Charles Habstritt, Chuck Habstritt, Scott Habstritt, Jim Habstritt, Gustav Kveen, Ed Baumgartner, Mike Baumgartner, Bob Bergland, Stephen Dahl, George Helmstetter, Evert Helmstetter, Steven Helmstetter, Yvonne Magnusson, Richard Magnusson, Charles Lund, Doc Berry, Don Berry, Brent Benike, Dwight Roll, and many others. What I have learned in my career is that it truly does take a Village to produce great outcomes, and in this case a Village composed of individuals and families from Roseau, Lake of the Woods, and Ramsey counties.

Major contributions from the Village I worked in:

On my first trip to Roseau, in late June of 1974, I was taken out to a Kentucky bluegrass field, directly north of the Habstritt Farms seed processing facility, to view the quackgrass challenge that I would face in my career. The field was infested with the most vigorous and phenotypically diverse patches of quackgrass that I had ever seen in my life. The group that took me out to the site were members of the families and organizations that I would work with for the next 46 years. They showed me a plot of quackgrass that had been treated with a new herbicide at that time, called Roundup. The plot had been treated the previous fall with a high rate of the herbicide; the quackgrass regrowth in the treated plot was more vigorous than what was in the untreated check. The herbicide treatment had just thinned out the quackgrass stand and made it more vigorous. I remember Charles Habstritt Sr. looking at me with a grin on his face as he wished me good luck in my career that was designed to subdue quackgrass. But now, when I look back on that day, I can say that I did have a great career. However, my accomplishments were the result of members of the Village working together to figure out how to subdue quackgrass in the grass seed production region of Minnesota.

I initiated a comprehensive quackgrass research program in the fall of 1974 to evaluate how herbicides, tillage, and cropping systems could

be used in combination to develop durable and profitable quackgrass management systems for grass seed producers. One of the new tools that became available that fall was Roundup, which became a very important tool in the development of effective quackgrass management systems for grass seed producers. Very early on in the development of glyphosate for the control of quackgrass in grass seed production systems, we discovered that regardless of the rate or date of treatment quackgrass regrowth always occurred following the initial application. In subsequent research, we discovered that a nocturnal weevil (Notaris bimaculatus) invaded quackgrass stems and then migrated into the rhizomes where they fed on the rhizomes, resulting in the detachment of rhizome segments from the parent plant, prohibiting the translocation of glyphosate into the detached rhizome sections. Buds on the detached rhizome segments sprouted, allowing the re-establishment of the quackgrass populations. This understanding led to the design and implementation of successful quackgrass control systems.

The cost of Roundup, in its early stage of introduction, was about $30 per acre, which was very expensive for use in the grass seed production system, limiting its use by producers. Producers tried to reduce the cost of the Roundup treatments by reducing the rate of application, but this resulted in a dramatic reduction in quackgrass control. My project discovered how to cut the cost of the Roundup treatment by 50 percent without a corresponding reduction in quackgrass control. We discovered that if the water carrier rate was cut by 50 percent, when the herbicide rate was reduced by 50 percent, the control remained equal to the full herbicide rate with the standard carrier rate. The Roundup label was modified by Monsanto to reflect this discovery, which saved grass seed producers and other farmers a lot of money over the years.

Since the glyphosate treatments failed to give complete control of quackgrass prior to seeding new stands of Kentucky bluegrass, we developed a technique to selectively control tall growing quackgrass in newly seeded Kentucky bluegrass fields. It was based on the principle that quackgrass regrowth from rhizomes produce tall stems, while newly seeded Kentucky bluegrass did not produce stems without vernalization. This situation provided for a height differential between the two species, allowing for the spraying or wiping of a glyphosate solution on the tall growing quackgrass stems without making contact with the low growing Kentucky bluegrass plants. My research team developed and evaluated several prototype applicators that provided the proof of concept. Then, we worked in partnership with Dwight Roll, Myron Kofstad, and Charles Habstritt, to develop a roller applicator that allowed for the selective application of glyphosate solutions on quackgrass stems and leaves in new seedlings of Kentucky bluegrass. This selective treatment delayed the reestablishment of quackgrass in Kentucky bluegrass seed production fields. We developed a company to produce the roller applicators and made them commercially [available] to producers across the country. The roller applicator was also used to control tall growing Park off-types in fields of

short, elite varieties of Kentucky bluegrass that were being introduced for seed production in the region.

My research team discovered that herbicides from two new herbicide families, the FOPs and DIMs, which had been developed to control annual and perennial grasses in dicot crops, could also be used to selectively control quackgrass in creeping red fescue, sheep fescue, and hard fescue. This opened up the potential to move the seed production of these fescue species into the Roseau and Lake of the Woods region, along with the ability to selectively manage quackgrass in the seed production system. When this discovery was made, none of varieties of these fescue species performed well in the region. However, Eric Watkins, the University of Minnesota’s turf grass breeder, has since developed, and will soon release, a new high yielding creeping red fescue variety for production in the region, allowing for another grass seed crop to be produced in the region in which quackgrass can be selectively controlled.

My herbicide biochemistry team was the first research team in the world to discover the mode-of-action of the FOP and DIM herbicide families. The site of action was ACCase, a key enzyme in lipid synthesis in all plants. This discovery led to the development of Poast tolerant field corn and sweet corn varieties, which were marketed commercially by Pioneer Hybrid, DeKalb, and PepsiCo.

The major outcome of the ACCase research effort, however, was in support of the grass seed industry, through the development of Assure II tolerant perennial ryegrass. Kevin Betts, working in partnership with Nancy Ehlke and Donn Vellekson, developed the first Assure II tolerant perennial ryegrass variety through the crossing of an annual ryegrass selection that contained an herbicide resistant form of ACCase, with a turf type perennial ryegrass line. This discovery led to the development of the University of Minnesota’s perennial ryegrass breeding program. This breeding program helped to initiate the perennial ryegrass seed production industry in the Roseau and Lake of the Woods region of Minnesota. The ryegrass breeding program has developed turf type perennial ryegrass varieties with good winter hardiness, Assure II tolerance, and improved texture and color. The Assure II tolerant varieties allow producers to control quackgrass selectively in perennial ryegrass seed fields. Ranger, Ranger II, Artic Green, Green Emperor, Polar Green, and Royal Green perennial ryegrass varieties developed by the University of Minnesota breeding program have been released to grass seed producers in the region over the last 20 years. New perennial ryegrass varieties with improved color are scheduled to be released from the program very soon.

The development of effective, glyphosate-based quackgrass control programs in all cropping systems associated with the grass seed production system, along with the introduction of Assure II tolerant perennial ryegrass, has opened up the production of many additional commercial perennial ryegrass varieties, which now supports a very

vibrant perennial ryegrass production and processing industry in the Roseau and Lake of the Woods region.

Following many years of the evaluation of the phenotypic variation in quackgrass populations collected in the Roseau and Lake of the Woods region we identified lines of quackgrass that we incorporated into a population of quackgrass that produced high forage yields with high digestibility. The selected line was released as a forage grass variety, named Evert, which was a result of a collaboration with Nancy Ehlke and Craig Sheaffer.

Based on the successful development of the grass seed industry in the Roseau and Lake of the Woods region over the last 70 years, it is now viewed by many as a model for the development of similar collaborative programs in other regions of the state. A diverse set of individuals and organizations, including faculty, state agencies and community leaders are working together to develop this type of program for the entire state of Minnesota through the Forever Green Initiative. The program is now focused on the development of 15 new perennial and winter annual crops, that can be incorporated into Minnesota’s agriculture system to produce ecosystem services and new economic opportunities for producers and rural communities. MCIA, and several grass seed producers, and seed processors have been instrumental in supporting the development of this new initiative. These groups have played very important roles in the development of one of the first Forever Green crops, Kernza. The University of Minnesota recently released MN-Clearwater, which is the first perennial grain variety developed in the world. It is now available for production by Minnesota grain and seed producers. For additional information on the Forever Green Initiative go to the Forever Green website: https://forevergreen.umn.edu.

I also want to acknowledge the University of Minnesota faculty and administrators that have supported the development of the grass seed industry in the Roseau and Lake of the Woods region of Minnesota. Park Kentucky bluegrass was developed by H.L. Thomas, a grass breeder in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics. Carl Borgeson, Secretary of MCIA, worked with two grass seed producers, Gustav Kveen and Charles Habstritt, to evaluate the performance of Park Kentucky bluegrass in the Roseau environment, and found that it was an excellent seed producer. This discovery resulted in a rapid expansion of the grass seed industry in the region. The Agronomy and Plant Genetics Department heads, Herbert Johnson, Orvin Burnside, Kent Crookston, Burle Gengenbach, Nancy Ehlke and Gary Muehlbauer, have provided the level of support for Laddie Elling, Nancy Ehlke, Donn Vellekson, and myself that was necessary to continue our work on the issues facing the grass seed industry over the last 60 years. The Horticultural Science Department heads also provided support for the turfgrass breeding programs led by Don White and Eric Watkins that have and will continue to contribute to the long-term vitality of Minnesota’s grass seed industry. I also want to acknowledge the support of the Richard Magnusson Family, Marv Zutz, MDA personnel, and all of the members of the Northern Minnesota Grass Seed Producers organization that made it financially possible for University of Minnesota personnel to support the grass seed industry.

Note: The above text has been lightly edited. MCIA also published an edited and condensed version of this text in the fall 2024 issue of the Minnesota Seed Grower.

Celebration of Life Gathering

Welcome, Prayer, Todd Pester

Message

Song – “Perfect”

Video clip – Don & Bev “Going to the Fair”

Song – “Fall On Me”

Introductions

Messages

Thank speakers, introduce song - Imagine

Song – “Imagine”

Introduce: Steve, Mitch, Roger

Messages

Thank speakers, introduce song – One Headlight

Song – “One Headlight”

Closing Comments

Prayer

Please join me in a moment of silence and prayer.

God, we thank you for this day and for all who have gathered to remember and celebrate the life of Dr. Donald Leroy Wyse. Don dedicated his life to loving his wife and family, helping others, and working tirelessly to improve the world he knew. He was a gentle soul to those in need and a fierce opponent to social injustice wherever he found it. We are thankful for his life, his work, and his compassion for others, and we trust that he remains in your care. Amen.

Many years ago we were having a family dinner with Don and Bev and at the end of the blessing before the meal Don blurted out “And God Bless Grandpa”. We all had a good laugh, but it stuck, and over the years it became our thing. A year or so after, while Don and Bev were visiting us in St. Louis… and by us, I mean the grandkids. We all went to “The Painted Pot” to make a few items. You pick the item, paint and decorate it, although they still look like pieces of clay with gray goop on them. The store then sends them off to be fired and they return a few days later as precious pieces of art. That day, our son Hayden chose to make this wine glass (the kids knew Papa really like his wine, and he would often have a glass with dinner…). And Hayden inscribed on it the words “God Bless Grandpa”. We all had a good laugh again, but it will always have a special meaning to us, especially now. So here’s to you Don. “God Bless Grandpa”

Bev Wyse

Ed Sheeran

Andrea and Matteo Bocelli

Todd Pester

Alina Smolskaya

Maggi Adamek

Rep. Ginny Klevorn

Todd Pester

John Lennon

Todd Pester

Steve Morse

Mitch Hunter

Roger Wyse

Todd Pester

The Wallflowers, Jakob Dylan

Dawn Wyse-Pester

Welcome

On behalf of Bev and the family, thank you for coming today. I’m Todd Pester, Don and Bev’s son-in-law. Don would have loved the opportunity to be in this room with each of you, laughing, joking, and sharing stories. He always liked a good party and he and Bev hosted many of them over the years, for graduate students and special occasions. Our wish is that our time together today is truly a celebration of his life, with more laughter than tears.

It’s difficult to summarize a person’s life in a pamphlet or single column in a newspaper, especially Don’s. He was larger than life and touched so many people, evident by all of you here today and the outpouring of stories and memories shared by those who worked closely with him over the years. Bev is so thankful for those stories, which have provided additional insights for her on the magnitude of Don’s influence.

To celebrate Don today, we’re going to try to “Tell the Damn Story” of his life. Several of his friends and family will share their stories of Don to chronicle his life, interspersed with a few special songs and many photos. Some showing Don with darker hair, shorter hair, and even shorter white shorts from the 80’s. And of course, his many colorful shirts. [humor] As you know, Don was always quiet and reserved, never wanted to share his opinion, but those shirts gave him confidence to get out of his shell. Just kidding, you always knew when Don was in the room.

No one knows Don’s story better than Bev and she would like to share a few of her thoughts with you today on their life together and words of encouragement.

Message

Bev Wyse

They say someone is truly never gone until you stop remembering them. I think there is truth in this. When part of you left this earth Don, a part of me went with you.

But I know you left some of yourself behind. For me and our family to always have near each of us. When you left this earth I gathered your things and held them close to my heart. I closed my eyes and for a moment it felt like you where here with me again.

When you left this earth I went through our pictures and videos. I studied your face and words harder then I ever have. And for a moment, those pictures and videos brought you to life once more for me and our family.

When you left this earth I have found as many reasons as I can to talk about what you have done over the last 50 years. I tell stories about you. And for a moment as I do this, I’m living in those stories and memories again. Everyday, I find as many reasons as I can to remember you my dear husband, friend.

I find as many reasons as I can to not let you totally leave this earth behind because every day, it brings me peace to know that as long as I remember you and others remember you. A part of you will always be here with all of us. Reminding us to move your vision forward.

I will miss Don and I dancing in the kitchen to our favorite songs. I will miss taking walks with Don through our favorite prairie parks and walking hand and hand along beautiful mountain lakes

I will miss our wonderful trips to Yellowstone sitting by our special geyser’s for hours and hours in the rain and sunshine waiting till they went off. (Even sometimes using flashlight to watch them go off in the dark).

I will miss sitting together with Don and Mesa boy, our dog, in a meadow in Yellowstone watching a herd of buffalo grazing with their young calves.

I will miss Don driving me though his research plots and listening as he explained about each research plot and plant. I would watch him and enjoy the excitement in his voice and in his eyes as he talked to me about each one

I will miss seeing Don having so much fun at the State Fair talking to people about Forever Green over the years. (In fact before Don passed he was excitedly working on how to make the Forever Green booth bigger and better this year.)

I will miss him kidding me when he said that he “Loved me more when he hugged and kissed me goodbye in the morning on his way to work.” I will miss his bigger than life personality and watching his visionary brain at work.

But most of all I will miss the look he always gave me when he would tell me “that I was the best thing that ever happened to him in his life time.”

We were truly soul mates - half of me went with Don when he passed, and at the same time half him stayed with me when he took his last breath.

To our family Dawn (Todd) Ryan (Mary) and our grandkids Hayden (Leah) Cameron (Megan), Connor and Lara (Jake). Dad and Papa was always so devoted to all of you and to me. He would just light up when he saw each of us. We were his whole world and everything else in his life was secondary

Don wants you to know that he will still be challenging each of you, loving each of you, and he will always have your back in what ever you do in your life.

Dad and Papa will be by your side laughing and watching each of you have fun, and he will be enjoying all of your accomplishments in the future

He will be with each of you in all of the good times and the difficult time in your life

But most of all remember he loved each of you and was so proud of all of you.

He loved who each of you had become over the years from the time you were born till now.

Dad and papa wants you to understand that if you need him just talk to him and he will answer you through your heart.

He will never leave your side he will just be in a different form.

He is standing near each of you today just like he is standing today by me as I talk to you.

If you open yourself up you will feel his huge hug he is giving to each of you today and you will hear his laughter in your head and feel his love for each of you in your heart.

Always remember watch for the signs that he will be sending to each one of us to let us know that he is forever near all of us. He did not leave us

he is here with us and he always will be

Thank You & Song

Thank you Bev. This first song we’ll share today is “Perfect” by Ed Sheeran. This song was very special to Bev and Don, as it describes their life together “perfectly”. Two kids, falling in love, and setting out to take on the world, against all odds. Then building a beautiful family and life together.

“Perfect,” Ed Sheeran

Video Clip

Don & Bev “Going to the Fair”

Song

The next song is “Fall On Me” by Andrea and Matteo Bocelli. Don had big shoulders to provide support and comfort for his family, friends, and colleagues. Bev, Dawn, Ryan, and the grandkids have each logged many hours on Don’s (or Papa’s) chest, as he was saying “Fall On Me”. When things weren’t going well he’d tell you “it will be okay”. And when things were going okay he’d tell you “to dream bigger, work harder”. His arms were always open to love and support those in need and cheer them on. The last verse speaks to our loss of Don. Now that he’s gone, many are searching for signs of him, asking him to “fall on us, with all his light, from wherever he is”.

Fall On Me, Andrea and Matteo Bocelli

Introductions

Don had deep passion for helping others and a profound impact on many people, cultures, and communities he encountered. To share “a bit more color” on these characteristics, we’ll hear from

• Alina Smolskaya, a graduate research assistant

• Maggie Adamek, a long-time colleague, working on social equity and opportunities, and her husband Karl Lorenz

• State Representative, Ginny Klevorn

Ladies, if you would, please introduce yourselves as you share your stories.

Alina Smolskaya

There are not many people who you can say changed the course of your life, but for me, Don was that person. Before I met Don, I was a businesswoman who loved growing plants at home, absolutely unaware that people could have a career in this field. Fortunately, I met Don at the state fair Forever Green booth, where his enthusiasm for agriculture and science drew everyone to talk to him. After our meeting at the state fair, Don shared his email and encouraged me to reach out. After a brief email exchange, Don took the time to introduce me to the world of plant science. I couldn’t believe it - it sounded like a dream career and here was an expert willing to help me! Shortly after, Don set up meetings with faculty in charge of various undergraduate programs in CFANS and even attended some of those meetings with me. After we met with all the faculty, Don again took the time to talk with me about which program seemed like the best fit. He even set up a meeting with his grandson, Hayden, who kindly shared his experience about student life at the university. The following semester, I left my business and came to study plant science at U of MN. Being a student now, I see how busy professors are and I am surprised - how did Don find the time to go out of his way so many times to help me? I think it really goes to show the kind of caring professor that Don was.

Don was extremely encouraging and believed in students. After I had already transferred, he would check in with me on how things were going and encouraged me to work in a lab on campus. Something I didn’t find out about until much later is that during that same time, Don again went out of his way and advocated to faculty in our department about me for an undergraduate research position. Thanks to his encouragement, I joined a really great lab, fell in love with research, and am now working towards a graduate degree in plant science.

Time and time again, Don kindly went out of his way to help me, but I am not the only case like this. There are numerous other students who went

on to get a graduate degree in plant science after meeting Don who helped to guide them towards their dream career. One of them is my friend Quinn, who is now doing a PhD in plant breeding at Cornell and another is Kayla who got a PhD in plant breeding here from UMN after meeting Don and is currently working as a hops breeder in the USDA. As you can tell from these stories, Don was a great advocate for plant sciences and a caring professor who significantly impacted the lives of many people, especially students.

Don was committed to student success and had a great gift for storytelling and working with others. When I was a student in his class, I remember most of his lectures started with the following: “Let me tell you a story..” This was a common signature line in class that I remember fondly as it made attending his lectures fun - almost like going to a book reading or the movies rather than attending a lecture about the modes of action of various herbicides.

Don was a very caring teacher. One of the classes he taught was a seminar course for Applied Plant Science graduate students. However, Don did not just teach the students how to give a good seminar but he would go above and beyond to ensure that each student was well prepared for their Monday talk - even if that meant staying over the weekend with the student to help them prepare. That is the kind of exemplary professor Don was - unshakably dedicated to student success.

I feel very fortunate to have met Don at the state fair some years ago, and I will forever be grateful to him for believing in me and changing the course of my life. Don was a very special person who touched the lives of many students throughout his career. His optimism and enthusiasm for life and science have been infectious and inspiring. Don will forever have a special place in our hearts and he will be deeply, deeply missed.

Margaret Adamek

As a protégé, colleague, and friend of Don’s for three decades, how do you do justice to his legacy and impact in a few minutes? Shadow long. Shoes large. Hole huge. Finally committed to the words I share today well and truly means he’s gone, something I continue to struggle to accept. I am grateful to the Wyses and Pesters for this opportunity to honor, pay tribute, and remember our dear friend and remarkable, rare force.

Don exemplified and taught lessons to the lucky mentees in his orbit by example, provision of opportunity and support, and commitment. It was all in the interests of good trouble, as civil rights icon, John Lewis, so aptly put it. I’d like to share some of the things he taught me through our journey of making good trouble together.

The Personal is Paramount - Don was a solid and dedicated person–a long haul kind of guy, who treated the people he loved most with care and attentiveness. It has always been apparent how deeply he loved Bev and what a committed and good husband and father he was. He spoke often of his respect and appreciation for her as an accomplished professional and a co-parent, which reflected his regard for women and devotion to family.

Right Wrongs, Do Good - Don cared deeply about justice and community and felt he had a role to play as a public agricultural scientist for rural, tribal, and urban communities alike. For years, tribal nations conveyed their deep concerns about the University’s wild rice research agenda and its impact on water quality, wild rice, and their sacred responsibilities to protect both. After years of repeatedly being stonewalled and stymied by university leaders in response to rightful information requests, Don was a trusted, reliable partner to tribes, consistently sharing information that was supposed to be publicly available but was hard to get. He advocated internally to support tribal priorities and concerns around wild rice and worked with Minnesota tribes to explore where regenerative agriculture and perennial crops could align with tribal values and support their economic well-being. Don’s tribal partners deeply appreciated this work, including him in ceremonies and gifting him with traditional objects. He was equally interested in supporting urban high schools’ efforts to integrate plant production and perennial and horticultural crops into high school STEM education. His careerlong commitment to farmers and rural economies drove his science, his organizing, and his peerless networking.

Use Your Power for the Public Good - Tenure is both a right and responsibility; Don understood and maximized the power and protection of tenure, using it as a superpower for the land and community. He lobbied for and received legislative funding when the University didn’t want him to. Pretty much every year. He spoke up at faculty assemblies and in the Dean’s office and wrote pointed emails to the president on salient issues. He knew, despite administrative grumbles and legislatively

seasonal blowback from university leadership, that he had a job for life. And that job was to advance needed initiatives, build collaborative platforms of key stakeholders, and leverage public support and resources to carry these efforts out via the land grant system. For Don, tenure provided a way to move things forward that those who were more vulnerable, less well-positioned and had more to lose could not. He used tenure for the good of the people, conducting his science and associated organizing and advocacy with the public benefit end in mind.

Think Big – Don never did small potatoes. And, he didn’t play checkers; he played chess. I had the opportunity to facilitate a strategic planning process for his department, thanks to him. He sketched out his ideas for Forever Green and told me that he would need to raise a lot of money. I asked how much he needed to develop germplasm and supply chains to transform agriculture, clean up waterways from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, and heal 11 million acres of the North American prairie. Transforming everything everywhere seemed like a reasonable and laudable thing to do, and I was equally certain that Don could pull it off, given his customary scale of ambition. With a totally straight face, Don looked me dead in the eye and said, “I have to raise at least $1B to do this right.” I couldn’t fathom how Don and his colleagues could raise $1B, but when he worked with key corporate partners to raise $50M for graduate assistantships right out of the gate, I realized the power of his ideas, persuasion, and reach.

And look where Forever Green is now. I have been a bystander, a witness, an actor, a partner, and contributor to this work, as have so many others. We all knew the strategic importance and visionary power of this effort –perennializing the landscape to save the world and the earth. Don made us see how it mattered in a big way, a long-term way, and an essential way. Who would want to miss out on being a part of that?

Lead, Enable, and Cultivate – Don had inborn leadership abilities–charisma, vision, passion, drive, brilliance, and kindness. All types of people liked and trusted him and felt valued and supported by him, from tribal elders, farmers in northern Minnesota, radical nuns, African American community center leaders, graduate students, you name it, even my teenage son. Leadership to Don wasn’t just about being in front or at the forefront. It was also about equipping, positioning, advancing, and connecting people to make good trouble together. He was as generous as he was strategic, providing opportunities and positioning people for them to grow, give back, and accomplish good things. Many of us benefitted from Don’s mentorship, which could include some tough talk like being told to get a grip, buckle down, try harder, listen more, keep going, and understand what doing excellent work entails. Through this support and care, many flourished in their careers that served the public, equipped with the leadership skills and know-how to become leaders of their own.

For thirty years, Don Wyse was the best kind of mentor-friend one could

hope for. He encouraged me, had my back, stood in front and beside me when I needed it, counseled me, helped me out, gave me opportunities and told me over and over again that I was one of the most capable people he had ever worked with. Every time I heard it, I was so touched and humbled, and it meant the world to me because I knew he meant it and that made me believe it just a little bit too. His words instilled confidence in me, which has been a true gift.

My great comfort now is that, by coincidence, his bright and wonderful granddaughter Lara began an internship with my company this summer. I was frequently texting Don the weeks before his death about how terrific and smart she is, which I later learned from Bev and Dawn he was also sharing with them. His last text to me said, “I need your help. We need to meet,” a text I received a few times a year from him, and a text I sent to him a few times a year too. I responded, “Tell me when and where, and I’ll be there.”

And here we are.

I will miss you Don and am so deeply grateful for all that you have given me and who you have been in my life. By way of benediction, let me share these words from agrarian, poet, and philosopher, Wendell Berry: He goes free of the earth.

The sun of his last day sets clear in the sweetness of his liberty.

The earth recovers from his dying, the hallow of his life remaining in all his death leaves.

Radiances know him. Grown lighter than breath, he is set free in our remembering. Grown brighter than vision, he goes dark into the life of the hill that holds his peace.

He’s hidden among all that is, and cannot be lost.

Ginny Klevorn

It is a tremendous honor to be here with all of you today to celebrate Don Wyse — No matter how each of us describes Don:

Husband, Dad, Sibling, Grandpa

Colleague, Mentor, Professor, Scientist

Friend

We all have our stories, our memories -these stories and memories have shaped us into who we are and, if we chose, how we go forward —

Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.This story has 5 lessons.

So here I go:

The Beginning [ You are one of US!]

I met Don Wyse in May of 1980. My soon-to-be husband Tom had just accepted an assistantship with Dr. Wyse, as his third grad student. We came up from St. Louis for a few days to look for a place to live. Don and Bev, with two little ones, opened their home to us and showed us the campus and community.

When we returned after our wedding to our first shared apartment - Don had already made plans to help us move in: Mark and Larry were on the look out for our UHaul to arrive. They had us moved in to our third floor walk up in no time.

Lesson One - You belong here - you are one of us!

Don was good at teaching life lessons without telling you they are life lessons.

A wicked storm came through and just trashed the corn plants that were the final stage of another grad student’s experiment. Don gathered all the grad students and together they went out and staked each plant and saved the experiment.

Lesson Two: We help each other, no matter the difficulty of the task.

Don never hesitated to ask for our ideas and then ask all of the HARD challenging questions. He wasn’t being difficult, it was his way of getting us ready - for whatever may come next.

He knew, once we learned to trust ourselves, we were ready to trust others; work with others. He wanted each of us to be comfortable with taking risks.

Lesson Three: When you trust yourself, can find a way to accomplish your goals.

The Middle - [ You’ve got the Power].

To be accomplished, you have to do the work - there is no way around the work, do the work AND never lie, follow the data.

We can all hear his words: “What are you waiting for, have you ever met a garden hoe, are you committed … Don’s “gentle nudges.”

Don was never afraid to reach out and bounce his ideas off others. He expected us (Tom and me) to push back - to test his idea. Through the decades, I watched Tom and Don do this with each other - sitting outside on a bench, at Mims, or in the field. Sometimes saying “that’s never going to work” - the other responding “time will tell.” Celebrating the successes of the other.

Lesson Four: Push for your dreams. Do the work and I’m so damn proud of you.

The End - [Celebrate & The Work Continues]

We are here today to celebrate a wonderful, authentic man, Don Wyse.

We are here today to celebrate a life well lived focused on family, students, friends.

We are here today to celebrate the accomplishments of Don and our relationships to him through his work.

We are here today to support each other - as we move forward!

I can see Don - Sitting on my sofa at the Capitol, pointing his finger at me, a glimmer in his eye and a smile — getting ready to tell me another story — the story of all us, EACH one of us … stepping up, supporting students through the scholarship fund and doing the important work and moving the Forever Green Initiative Platform Forward

Lesson Five: We aren’t done, the dream continues —

Oh, there is great possibility before us — what are we waiting for ….. we must all get out there and do the work and

Tell the Damn Story!

Thank You & Song

Thank you Alina, Maggie, and Ginny for those great memories. The next song this afternoon is “Imagine” from John Lennon, and it really needs no introduction, but Don appreciated this song, because each lyric spoke to

his beliefs, vision, and hope for the world. Following the song, we’ll hear from

“Imagine,” John Lennon

Messages

Gentlemen, would you also please introduce yourselves as you provide additional insights on Don’s story.

• Steve Morse

• Mitch Hunter

• Roger Wyse

Steve Morse

Minnesota Environmental Partnership

I started collaborating with Don sometime in the mid 1990s, when he was working to get funding for MISA. We then moved on to securing funding for the Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships. Which are just two of many of his great visions he drove to implementation. Don is amazingly multi-dimensional. He understands and appreciates the power of vision, science, knowledge, as well as people and relationships. Such a rare mix, and he’s constantly knitting these together to make a difference. He also rightly claims credit for helping connect, my now wife, Debra and me during these times.

At his core, Don in not unlike an evangelical preacher. We would periodically meet for breakfast to plot strategy. It was at one of these in the early 2000’s that he first showed me the USDA images of chlorophyll concentrations across the upper Midwest throughout the growing season, laying out the narrative he would build and develop for decades. It totally reordered my thinking about our ag systems and their environmental interactions and led to years of collaboration on this work. These images also prompted the name Green Lands, Blue Waters.

One week ago today, we were part of a tour of Forever Green crops, and there was Don, out in the field, standing before some very impressive Kernza stands, explaining to a delegation of European climate funders the history and impact of this evolving crop he played such a role in developing. At the time, I thought this was such a great Don moment and I’m glad I took this photo. After years of relentless and unfailing pursuit of his vision; here was an important tangible outcome.

His active, always processing mind, never quits. In a quintessential Don

move, just Saturday afternoon, he sent a one sentence message to me and colleagues at Friends of the Mississippi River: Do we have a plan for a comprehensive response to the loss of regulatory agency power? And what he really meant is; after recent supreme court decisions, we better get on it and fast.

Don’s love for his family was always part of his awareness, so often he spoke of Bev, their children and now, how fantastic the next generation of grandchildren are. Just part of the enduring legacy of this giant.

Joy all around -- as it always was when Don was present!

Mitch Hunter Forever Green

Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Mitch Hunter and I’m the Associate Director of the Forever Green Initiative. Dawn and Todd asked me to speak on behalf of Forever Green about “the now and the next.”

Nick Jordan, Forever Green Co-Director, and Colin Cureton, Forever Green Director of Adoption and Scaling, helped me hone these remarks. Thank you, guys.

Before I get into that, I need to say a few words about Don. Suffice to say, it was never, ever boring to be around Don. On the surface, he was a walking contradiction.

Don

He was both an old hippie and a herbicide chemist.

He was both a dreamer and a skeptic.

He could be gruff, but he was fundamentally kind.

He could be infuriating, but his huge heart always won you over.

Through all this, Don…was always Don. Somehow not a contradiction at all. You knew exactly what you were going to get — the same integrity, the same intensity of focus, the same optimism in the face of long odds, and the same sense of humor, whether you were shooting the breeze in the hallway or meeting with State Legislators.

Our Relationship

Now, I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that Don scared the shit out of me at first. Barely two days after I met him in 2018, I had the audacity to give him a little sass over a beer at the Kernza conference. He just looked at me and deadpanned, “You know I could fire your ass, right?” My heart stopped for a second, but I could tell from the twinkle in his eye that I wasn’t in trouble.

A few months later I was in his office wedged between two giant desks, filing cabinets, seed bags, stacks of papers, with a dreamcatcher dangling overhead. He looked me in the eye again and said, “What can you do?”

I stammered and started naming all the methodologies I’d learned in grad school, while Don just sat there squinting at me. It was pretty intimidating at the time, but with hindsight, I know that Don was just trying to see where I fit into his grand vision.

What he really needed was fellow organizers. When I started this job two years ago, I sat in Don’s office once again and he laid out the whole universe of stuff that needed to get done. At one point he stopped, wagged his finger at me and said, “Are you an organizer?”

I said yes, with a little more confidence this time. Much to my amazement, just weeks later, Don started clearing out that office. He filled a giant rolling tote with old papers, dusty awards, journals, knick-knacks, and other detritus from a 50-year career. He decamped to the tiny office next door, and gave me the big one.

But, Don never stopped working to achieve his big vision. He died with his boots on—or rather, his Dude shoes and his loud plaid shirt.

Now that little office is empty and I am without a mentor, a friend, a coconspirator, a jokester, and the most interesting person I’ve ever worked with.

Forever Green “Now” and “Next”

OK, moving on to my assignment from Dawn and Todd. One of Don’s favorite questions when it came to new crop germplasm was, “What have you got? Is it real?”

Now I’ll try to answer that question for Forever Green as a whole. Well, thanks to Don, we’ve got over 15 crop teams organized all the way from basic genomics, to agronomy, soil science, food science, biosystems engineering, and commercialization.

We’ve released new varieties of Kernza, winter barley, and hairy vetch, with a pipeline of hybrid hazelnut, camelina, pennycress, perennial flax and more that will be in farmers’ hands soon.

Our commercialization team is pioneering a nationally unique model for scaling regenerative agriculture.

The Forever Green Partnership is organizing the broad and powerful network of NGOs, policymakers, businesses, and farmers that Don helped build.

And we’ve got strong support from both the University of Minnesota and the State Legislature.

Of course, Forever Green is facing a major transition right now. We’ve lost our visionary and chief troublemaker.

But the team is strong. The network is strong.

We have stable base funding from the Legislature—thanks to Ginny Klevorn leading the charge.

18 months ago we created an Executive Committee in anticipation of Don and Nick’s eventual departure. Don trusted that group to lead Forever Green into the future.

Forever Green “Next”

So what’s next? It feels like we’re at an inflection point. Our crop teams are humming. The commercialization team is fielding a wave of inquiries from the likes of Hormel and General Mills—while also engaging with small companies and startups. Our farmer-support program tripled in size this year. We’re forging new bonds with long-time supporters like the Land Stewardship Project.

We’re about to hire our inaugural Director of Partnerships and Outreach. The Kernza market is rebounding. And our work on the winter oilseeds, camelina and pennycress, is catching fire: Cargill is investing in our research and increasing their winter camelina pilot ten-fold, to 20,000 acres.

Even USDA higher-ups are calling to ask how they can help. So, yes Don, it’s real, and it’s becoming more real all the time.

And Don, I know that, wherever you are right now, you are just pissed because this is so much damn fun.

Closing

But to quote Don yet again: “It’s never easy.” Developing and scaling real crops is usually the work of entire nations.

Think soybean. Think canola. It can take hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars, and decades of focus and persistence.

This is where you all come in. Don wasn’t big on speechifying. He wanted action.

So let’s get organized. I can think of no better tribute to Don than for all of us —all of us — to come together and help make his vision a reality.

So, I want a little audience participation. Whenever Don presented on Forever Green, he’d make the audience count the months.

June, July, August — the three months of the year in Minnesota when cropland is fully covered by growing plants, between the end of planting and the beginning of harvest.

So get ready to count with me. How many months is it?

ONE. TWO. THREE.

As Don would say, “What could go wrong?”

I’ll miss you, Don, very much, and I’ll never, ever forget you.

Roger

Wyse

Thanks for the overwhelming turnout. It’s an amazing expression of the love and respect you had for Don. I must admit it has been a bit overwhelming to hear stories from all of you about the impact he had on your lives. I was familiar with the research and FGI achievements but was unaware of the impact he had on students, and rural communities like Roseau MN and the trust and respect he held with the gay and black communities, and with the Indian tribes.

As Don’s older brother my comments will be in two parts. First some stories about Don as we grew up on a small farm in Ohio. And second a call to action. Don left a great legacy, but he left us way too soon with a lot of work yet to be done to bring his vision to realization.

We grew up on a small 100-acre farm in northwest Ohio. It was a dairy farm, a rotation of corn, soybeans, pasture & hay, wheat and oats plus a few chickens. It was a regenerative farm, except for a continuous cover crop in the rotation.

As the first born I was the hedgehog and Don the fox, always curious, always probing, always challenging and always linking the dots; A people person. He made friends and connected easily even with total strangers.

Our mother died suddenly when we were 6 and 2 respectively and the differences in our personalities were exacerbated as we processed that traumatic event in our own private ways.

We went through several babysitters, a grandmother, and adapted to Dad’s new wife. And a few years later our sister, Marie, joined us.

As farm kids we learned to be creative, resourceful and responsible; the cows needed to be milked twice a day no matter what!

Don always said, “Tell the Damn Story”

Now I know he has told many stories about me, some are true, others are of questionable origin.

In the latter category is about an event he has told many of you; that I once buried him in a hole up to his neck. (how many of you have heard that story?)

Now I have no recollection of the event, but it obviously left a deep impression on Don since some 70 years later he was still talking about it. All I can say is that I do not recall the event, but those of you who knew and worked with him, particularly his deans and department heads, know he could be an SOB. So, if I did it, ---- he probably deserved it!

Another story is that I got him into college. That one is true, and I will

tell it as it gives you some insight into Don and where he came from to become a distinguished faculty member.

I was a senior at Ohio State when Don graduated from Chesterfield High School, a very small, rural and not very good school.

As you would expect, Don was an outgoing, fun-loving kid.

In HS he excelled at basketball and later pitching horseshoes. Our father Earl was a good competitive horseshoe pitcher. Don the athlete excelled in both sports.

On one of my trips home from college it was clear that Don was having fun but was going nowhere in that rural community that was clearly dying.

(as an aside it is a terrible example of the decline of rural areas into hopelessness, unemployment and drugs and yet is some of our most productive farmland; exactly what is addressed in Don’s vision)

But back to the story I told him it was time to get his ass off the tractor and get his act together because there was no future in rural Ohio for someone of his intellect and innate talent.

As part of the lecture, I promised to help him get into Ohio State.

What a naïve commitment that was!

I looked at his grades and course work; not good. He had taken typing, bookkeeping and mechanical drawing. No science, No math!

Sorry Bev but I think he took those courses because that was where the girls were!

To prepare him for the entrance exam we met on weekends in a sleazy motel in Toledo. I would drive up from Columbus and tutored him in preparation for the exam. To his credit he was committed and worked hard.

In those days OSU was required by law to accept all Ohio applicants. You were accepted in sequence based on your exam score: highest in fall quarter, second highest winter quarter and so on. Don was admitted the following summer!! But he got in!

The rest is history: he graduated with honors, followed me to Michigan State University’s Department of Crop Science where we both got our PhDs.

Fresh out of his PhD, Don came here to U of M where he has spent his entire career of over 50 years. I went to USDA ARS, then into academic

administration as Dean at two universities and for the last 20 years in the private sector as a venture capitalist investing in innovative companies in agriculture, food and industrial biotechnology. Our careers diverged but then came back together; a point I will mention later.

Early in his career Don began talking about un-sustainable production practices on the inequities in the whole agricultural system and his radical idea for restructuring the whole system.

My advice to him: GET TENURE FIRST!

A few years later we were both speakers at a national conference, and I heard him speak about his vision. He was articulate, spoke with emotion, and with passion. It was clear he was on a mission and was going to damn well try and restructure the whole system.

My reaction: Wow, this is my kid brother, from this little farm in Ohio, and he going to kick ass?

Regenerative agriculture is in vogue now, but it was a crazy idea 40 years ago. The rest of us were enamored by Monsanto and its technologies that were going to transform agriculture. But Don saw through all of that, looking deeper into the unintended consequences.

By sheer force of vision and personality, undeterred by university culture and politics, the disruptive Fox, went on to build an amazing legacy that we honor today.

A legacy as a thought leader and a chess master at bringing together diverse groups to build an institution and a movement, The Forever Green Initiative.

All built on a vision WHERE:

• The social, environmental, and economic inequities of our current agrifood system are replaced with an even more productive agricultural system that thrives on fairness, equity, and in harmony with nature.

• Where Farmers receive a fair and equitable share of the value they create

• Where Rural communities are revitalized, and consumers have access to an abundant and affordable supply of healthy nutrient dense foods.

As it turns out our career paths began to reconverge about 10 years ago. Don had built the FGI, and I was investing in companies that enable disruptive solutions to the environmental challenges facing our food system and particularly as we place agriculture at the foundation of a more biobased economy.

Companies that integrate nicely into regenerative practices. They replace insecticides with insect pheromones, and synthetic Nitrogen fertilizers with microbially derived nitrogen. Our careers reconverged at an opportune time to confront the challenge of accelerating commercialization of regenerative practices.

It will require a multifaceted strategy involving partnerships (such as the one Don negotiated with Cargill for commercialization of Camelina), new state and federal policies providing risk mitigation products and incentives, and capturing the ecosystem credits farmers generate to improve the economics of farmers and rural communities.

Without building that ecosystem Don’s dream and the dream of my companies and the regenerative movement will either never be realized or realized too late.

This leads me to my challenge and call to action, to you, the Forever Green community and its stakeholders.

We are all here to celebrate Don’s life and to remember all the positive interactions we had with him and the leadership he provided to the FGI Movement.

But frankly he left us with a lot of work before his vision is even close to being realized.

And as in all transitions it is when the strong, charismatic leader leaves, that the legacy is most vulnerable. So time is not on our side.

Together we must use Don’s vision as our “Northstar” and commit to working together to bring the vision to reality; where FGI products along with other regenerative farming practices are deployed broadly across the landscape of not just rural Minnesota but across rural America.

It will require that the FGI team remains cohesive, well funded and focused on developing great market ready products.

That will be critical but not sufficient.

It will require expanding the FGI community and linking with groups with similar objectives to advocate for new government policies, and new incentives, to develop new markets and new sources of capital to creatively drive commercialization.

AND a sense of urgency and a tinge of paranoia by all of us. Failure is not an option.

The best way to show our love and respect for Don is to commit to protecting and implementing his legacy. Working together as a community to accelerate deployment of Don’s vision.

We, his family, are committed to join with all of you bring the best ideas, our networks and our relationships to develop and implement plan to accelerate commercialization; so, Dons vision of a rural landscape covered with Forever Green is fulfilled.

Don, may you rest in peace knowing that your legacy is in good hands.

And bro, I am so proud of you as a person and what you have done for the future of agriculture.

Thank you all

Thank You & Song

Thank you, Steve, Mitch, and Roger, for sharing your stories.

For those who worked with Don during the past 10 years, you likely know that he loved his 2013 Prius. He especially loved that he got a great deal on it “if you’re not careful, you can spend $25 grand on a car”. And he was so proud to get 40 mpg. He even recently fixed the rear fender and removed the black duct tape that had been holding it together for over

2 years. He didn’t like to spend money that he didn’t have to. He would always say “Oh, it’s fine”

We had a large thunderstorm pass by our house on Monday night, with reports of over 2” of rain within an hour, which washed a lot of debris down streets and into storm sewers. I was walking our dog after the storm. It was dark on our street, but something caught my eye, I looked down and noticed “this” dollar bill, that somehow was not washed away by the water, but flattened out and stuck to the road for me to find. I told Dawn about it later that night and she asked “Was it from Dad?” One of those signs Bev talked about, right? And as I thought about it, I heard him say to me: “Hey Dude, take care of my Prius. Here’s a dollar, that should cover it.”

But prior to the Prius, Don had a red 1993 Jeep Wrangler, which he drove for 20 years until the rear floor boards rusted out, and we wouldn’t let the grandkids ride in it any more. Are you seeing a pattern here?

The final song we’ll share today is Don’s favorite. One Headlight by The Wallflowers, written by Jakob Dylan, who is the son of the legendary singer and song writer Bob Dylan (who was born in Duluth). The story Don told me years ago, was that he was driving home after work, headed north on I-35 and he heard it on the radio. And he immediately had to find out the name of the song and the band. This was 1996 (before smart phones) so he and Bev had to call the radio station. Don would have us play this song at nearly every family gathering if we were listening to music and he would always say “why do I like this song so much?”. Well, to us it was a no brainer. From the opening note there’s a driving beat and bass guitar (much like his drive), that develops into a funky melody, which suits Don’s personality to a tee. Like any great song, the lyrics can mean different things to different people. In the song, Don’s “Cinderella” is his true love “Bevy Ann” and it speaks to their perseverance as a couple, their adventure through life together, and his pursuit in the death of current ideas and challenging the status quo.

In his personal and professional life, whether it was moving his new young family from Ohio to Minnesota to work on quackgrass control in grass seed production, securing housing for his family during a period of 18-20% interest rates in the 70’s, patching rusted out mufflers with soup can lids to save money, pulling together and submitting a grant proposal 5 minutes before the midnight deadline, or planting soybeans into pennycress stubble in late June; Don always found a way to “patch things together, bring people and communities together, and drive it home, often with only “One Headlight”. So, as we listen to this song, picture Don driving his red Jeep Wrangler, in Birkenstocks and khaki pants, windows down, hair blowing in the wind, and his familiar head bop.

“One Headlight,” The Wallflowers, Jacob Dylan

Closing Comments

• We are overwhelmed with gratitude for all of you joining us today to celebrate Don’s life with us.

• Thank you to our speakers and guests who have traveled distances to be here with us in this celebration. It truly has been amazing and inspiring.

• It was a daunting task put in front of me a few weeks ago, to pull together a celebration event for my father. I’ll admit, a few sleepless nights.

• But through this process I have gained new, and renewed, communities of supporters and friends that share a common connection of love and appreciation for Don.

Reception

• Please remain seated until the ushers direct you to stand and exit

• The reception will be held in the area directly behind you, until 5:00 pm.

• We would love for you to join us to visit, share stories, and support one another

• We have a video camera set up in the “Heritage Gallery” room to capture short stories.

• Bev and the family would love to hear how you knew and experienced Don through “your story”.

• So please take a moment to do that if you’re able

• And “God Bless Grandpa”

machine model of production. As land grant institutions across the nation become increasingly focused on research that benefits an industrialized, corporate-controlled model of farming, science that’s accountable to farmers and the general public, as well as the land, is more important than ever. That’s why it is so critical that a key contribution Don made to regenerative agriculture — co-directing the nationally-known Forever Green initiative and the cutting edge research into the continuous living cover crops associated with it — continue, be further strengthened, and directed in a way that it is accountable, and useful, to the small and medium-sized farmers who are the bedrock of our land and rural communities.

Forever Green’s Roots

How committed was Dr. Wyse to furthering the land grant mission in Minnesota? Well, consider his response when his tenure as the executive director of MISA came to an abrupt end at the beginning of this century. MISA was started at the U of M in 1992 by a group of organizations, called the Sustainers Coalition, as an experiment in creating links between a land grant university and the public. The Land Stewardship Project was (and still is) part of the Sustainers Coalition, and has always seen MISA as a way to provide farmers seeking alternatives to the industrialized model of agriculture access to experts, research, and outreach at the U of M. Despite operating on a shoestring budget, over the years MISA has helped launch and support various initiatives related to sustainable agriculture education, research, and outreach.

Given MISA’s mission to connect farmers to sustainable ag research at the university, it made sense that Don was its original executive director. But, in 2000 he was forced to resign by Charles Muscoplat, who was then dean of the U of M’s College of Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Sciences. At the time, “philosophical differences” was given as the reason for Don’s forced departure, and Muscoplat had made it clear he was interested in gutting or even eliminating MISA as the ag college focused increasingly on research and outreach related to genetic engineering of crops and factory farming of animals. It was a tumultuous time, and there was plenty of animosity between the sustainable farming community and top officials at the state’s land grant institution.

Don would have been forgiven for simply moving on to another university — he certainly had the scientific bona fides to do so. But he stuck around, continued his work with regenerative farmers, and eventually helped launch Forever Green in 2012. He had apparently seen within individual researchers and the farmers who worked with them enough potential to advance regenerative ag from within an institution that at best ignored it, and at worse, was attempting to undermine it.

That’s why LSP and our allies have over the years repeatedly gone to the Minnesota Legislature to push for funding of Forever Green. We see this

initiative as a prime example of how a public institution can support a public good in the form of science and outreach that builds resilient food and farming systems. The fact that lawmakers have chosen to recognize this more than once by providing funding over the years gives one hope that regenerative farming systems are getting the attention and respect they deserve when it comes to public policy. After all, it was public funding that helped spawn the revolution in corn and soybean production during the 20th Century, and so public funding will be needed to drive us in a new direction during the 21st.

“None of those things are going to happen without a public investment,” Don told me a decade ago.

And good ideas often spawn other good ideas. MISA and the work to get more continuous living cover on the landscape served as the seedbed for Green Lands Blue Waters (GLBW), an initiative launched in 2004 by various land grant institutions, along with environmental and agricultural organizations (including LSP), representing several states. Like Forever Green, GLBW is proving that de-siloing the system and bringing researchers, farmers, and others from various backgrounds together across disciplines can pay big dividends in terms of innovative, practical ideas.

In 2014, Don talked on LSP’s Ear to the Ground podcast about the foundational thinking that went into the development of Forever Green. To him, it came down to the difference between agricultural productivity and agricultural efficiency. “We just don’t think the current system is efficient,” he said. His argument was that a system such as the corn-soybean rotation, despite its ability to fill bins, only covers the landscape a few months out of the year. That means such a system is actually very limited in its ability to capture energy from the sun, produce consistent income, and provide ecosystem services. It also leaves the soil exposed much of the year, which results in a plethora of environmental problems while threatening the biological health needed to ensure future productivity.

On the other hand, crops such as field pennycress, which can be planted in the fall and harvested for its oilseed in the spring after a crop like soybeans is interseeded into it, double the income from the same piece of land while protecting and building soil, as well as supporting pollinators. This is an example of a “relay” system where the growing seasons of two crops overlap — as one crop is winding down for the season, another is just getting started, thus increasing the land’s ability to produce profitability 12-months-out-of-the-year, something scientists call “temporal intensification.”

Today, some 16 crops, from hazelnuts to pennycress, are under development through the Forever Green Initiative. But, Don repeatedly made clear over the years, no matter how many alternative crops are developed, it does little good if they don’t make practical and financial

tell the damn story!