Helene Murray retires from leading this unique venture between the University of Minnesota and the agriculture community, and MISA finds a new home in the University of Minnesota Extension.
After 33 years of making her mark on sustainable farming in Minnesota, Helene Murray retired on June 12.
As Murray stepped away from her work as executive director of the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture
(MISA), the institute itself is moving out of the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences to a
new home in University of Minnesota Extension. Kathy Draeger, statewide director of the Regional Sustainable
Development Partnerships, will serve as MISA executive director as Extension works to “figure out what MISA 2.0
will look like,” Murray says. “It won’t be the same as it was, but it’s going to be a good fit.” The MISA office will remain
in 413 Hayes Hall, in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics.
MISA was established at the University of Minnesota in 1992 to bring together the agriculture community and the
University to develop and promote sustainable agriculture in the state. It was a joint venture between CFANS,
Extension and the Sustainers’ Coalition, a group of individuals and community-based nonprofits in the state.
Members of the coalition include the Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota, The Food Group, the Institute
for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Land Stewardship Project, Renewing the Countryside and the Minnesota Farmers’
Market Association.
“MISA was formed to be the door into and out of University of Minnesota resources,” Murray explains. It created
links between the University and the public to help farmers who were seeking alternatives to an industrialized
model of agriculture by giving them access to experts, research and outreach at the U.
The late Professor Don Wyse, MISA’s first executive director, hired Murray as the institute’s coordinator in 1993 just
after she received her PhD in crop and soil science from Oregon State University. She didn’t expect to stay this long: “I came here thinking I would be here for a year or two, be a postdoc, and then Don and I just hit it off immediately. We worked really well together all those years.”
Murray came to Minnesota well-equipped for the job: Her master’s work in horticulture involved living mulches—cover crops planted between horticultural crops to keep soil in place. She worked with a team funded by the Sustainable Agriculture Research and
Education (SARE) program to conduct whole farm case studies in western Oregon and Washington to research sustainable agriculture and develop educational programs. The work—which ended up being the basis for her doctoral work—created problem-solving partnerships between land-grant universities and agricultural and environmental constituents in that area.
That kind of interdisciplinary work was exactly what MISA set out to do. In the early days, MISA had funds to award competitive
team-building grants to bring together farmers, researchers—both students and faculty—Extension personnel, agency representatives and nonprofit organizations to jointly address issues affecting the long-term viability of agriculture. One team Murray
worked with was the monitoring team: “My job was to make sure they succeeded. We didn’t want to give money and get a report back at the end of it. [We looked] at ways to figure out how farmers could monitor things on their farms, to see if they were making
progress toward their goals: Were they improving soil health? Were they improving their economic benefits? Were they improving their quality of life?”
She also worked on the educational team with now- retired Professor Craig Sheaffer in developing the sustainable agriculture minor for both undergraduate and graduate students. A MISA component that has been invaluable in bringing initiatives to the University and to Minnesota agriculture is the management of the Endowed Chair in Agricultural Systems, which was funded by the School of Agriculture Alumni Association, the Minnesota State Legislature and other individual donors. The School of Agriculture association is tied to a two-year technical agriculture program the U had from the 1800s through 1960. The
endowed chair is filled every year or two with the charge of bringing in expertise to look at sustainable agriculture in the broadest sense of the term, Murray explains.
Past chairs have included CFANS Associate Dean Julie Grossman, who developed a series of cultural sensitivity activities in 2020 to assist students in developing skills to work with diverse populations of farmers and to develop relationships with farmer-advocacy organizations. Southeast Minnesota farmer Jean Mueller spent her 2019 term identifying markets for local wool producers to rebuild what was once a robust supply chain. Lee DeHaan ( PhD 2001), lead scientist at The Land Institute and 2026 recipient of the APG Distinguished Alumni Award, worked on building Kernza (intermediate wheatgrass) production and markets in Minnesota during his two terms in 2010-11 and 2015.
"He came up here and worked with Jim Anderson. So that's how we've come to have the Kernza releases that the department has now,” Murray says.
Steve Morse and Debra Elias Morse served as endowed chairs in 2003-04, developing cropping systems for improved watershed health in the Mississippi River Basin for the then fledgling Green Lands Blue Waters Initiative (GLBW). The initiative is a coalition tasked with promoting continuous living cover on farmland to prevent bare soil, improve soil health, sequester carbon, and reduce
nutrient runoff and erosion in the Upper Mississippi River Basin.
“The driving force was Don’s vision,” Murray says as she explains how GLBW sprouted out of MISA. In turn, APG’s Forever Green Initiative came directly out of GLBW. “Wyse saw the need for a Minnesota-focused program,and that's when Forever Green was born,” she says.
Wyse resigned from MISA in 2000, and Murray was hired as director in 2002.
The Eureka, California, native did not grow up in an agricultural setting, but Murray became interested while studying horticulture at College of the Redwoods. A professor’s suggestion that she consider studying agronomy sent her off to California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, where she received her BS in fruit science. She joined the Peace Corps after graduation and served two years in Nepal as an agricultural volunteer. She worked at the main horticulture station based in Kathmandu, setting up
crop rotation and cover cropping systems at farms throughout the country.
“We weren’t calling it sustainable agriculture at the time, but that’s pretty much what we were thinking about, trying to use more biology than chemical inputs," she says.
Murray returned to Nepal as a graduate student at Oregon State University, joining a team that worked on evaluating vegetable seed production there. Looking back over the three-plus decades with MISA, Murray admits that many don’t realize MISA was the
catalyst for many projects. She and Jane Jewett, now the former associate director of MISA, want to see good work done, Murray says, “and we don’t need to take credit for it.”
Jewett had been with MISA since 1999 and has taken a position in University of Minnesota Extension as a researcher based in the Grand Rapids office.
Kate Seager, who worked on the administrative end at MISA, has moved to a full-time role as contracts and grants administrator at the North Central Region Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education
Program.
Now that Murray is retired, she has her sights set on an easy summer. “I haven’t had a summer off since I was about 14 years old,” she says. Plans are to stay in Minnesota until January, when she and her husband will take off to someplace warm for a couple of months.
Best wishes on your retirement, Helene!
—Kristal Leebrick