Star Tribune
Minnesota crop artists may be able to put a little mustard on it
Minnesota crop artists may have reason to give thanks this week.
They may owe that thanks to a century-old nonprofit that safeguards this state’s crops — including the crops we glue together and display at the State Fair.
Yellow mustard seeds were a crop art staple. Plentiful, uniform in size, easy to dye, available in the grocery store spice aisle. But this year, fair officials warned, could be yellow mustard’s last year.
The first rule of Minnesota crop art is that you construct your art out of Minnesota crops. There was no evidence that anyone in Minnesota was growing yellow mustard.
But before officials cut the mustard, they put the question to the Minnesota Crop Improvement Association.
In the lobby of the state’s official seed certification agency hangs a framed piece of crop art: the MCIA logo, crafted out of soybeans. Everyone on staff had placed at least one soybean in the picture.
The Minnesota State Fair had come to the right place.
“Yellow mustard seed is sold as cover crop seed in Minnesota and crop producers usually use it for this purpose,” said Fawad Shah, president and CEO of the association that works to ensure that if you plant an MCIA-certified seed, that seed will grow.
The Minnesota State Fair has not yet announced whether yellow mustard will make a triumphant return to the crop art gallery in 2024.
But this week — dedicated to gratitude for the abundance of our farms and fields — is as good a time as any to give thanks for people like the staff of the Minnesota Crop Improvement Association who help bring that bounty about.
The harvest is in, which means this is the busy season for the MCIA’s small, dedicated staff. Thousands of bags of seed of all sorts are arriving for testing ahead of the new planting season. Oats. Ryegrass. A soybean rainbow. New varieties, bred to thrive in Minnesota’s short growing season. Sturdy wheat with stalks strong enough to stand up to prairie winds.
Certification is voluntary. But farmers know that behind that seal are crops that have passed a battery of quality tests to ensure they are what they say they are and do what they say they’ll do.
In laboratories on the University of Minnesota’s campus, next door to the fairgrounds, trained staff test seeds for moisture, purity, and germination and ensure they’re not mixed with contaminants like gravel or noxious weeds. They check established varieties, searching for signs of cross-pollination that could affect next year’s crop yield.
“There’s nothing flashy about our building or what we do,” said Shah, whose offices are down a gravel road, tucked behind university greenhouses. MCIA built the spacious old building, then gifted it to the university. “But it’s very important work that we do.”
His staff studies thousands of samples for quality, looking for healthy color and uniform size. They sprout seeds in batches — under all sorts of simulated weather conditions — to make sure that at least 85% are viable.
“So much depends on a plentiful harvest,” said Shah, whose staff works with companies and growers around the globe. You might find them meeting with an agricultural delegation from Zimbabwe or walking thousands of steps through farmers’ fields during inspection standard tours.
They hold farmers’ livelihoods in their hands, which makes it hard to believe that they found time this month to weigh in on crop art.
But there’s nothing Shah and his staff like more than talking about crops and all the ways they can be improved. If you like yellow mustard, wait until you hear about the new uses Minnesotans are finding for kernza and pennycress.
“The seed is life,” said Shah, jumping up like the professor he is to draw a diagram on a whiteboard in his office. The tough seed coat, encasing the endosperm that will nourish the plant embryo as it sprouts — roots spidering into the earth, shoots stretching toward the sun. Row after row, filling our fields, filling our tables this Thanksgiving week.
ZUMBRO RIVER VALLEY, MINN. – From his combine on an October afternoon, harvesting dried-out soybeans the color of dust, Martin Larsen points to a hillside where his ancestors from Scandinavia homesteaded.
History might be happening again on the Larsen farm.
Last year, on this plot of land along the Zumbro River, the 43-year-old farmer from Byron grew oats. Not oats for hogs or cows. But oats for humans. He hauled the oats to a miller across the state line into Iowa. A previous year, Larsen even had a contract with Oatly, the trendy Swedish maker of milk alternatives.
Something of an oat renaissance has been occurring down in the fields west of the Mississippi River. During winters, Larsen — through his job with the Olmsted County Soil and Water Conservation District — evangelized to fellow farmers on the humble small grain.
His friends and neighbors were listening. As of this fall, over 60 farmers, covering 6,000 acres across southern Minnesota, have joined Larsen’s informal coalition to grow food-grade oats. They call themselves the “oat mafia.”
Star of breakfast food, children’s books and, increasingly, those nondairy lattes, oats are easier on the environment, requiring less nitrogen than corn, which means a lot in the karst-rich hill country of southeastern Minnesota, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tasked state officials with cleaning up drinking water.
“Nitrates come from this,” said Larsen, driving his gray Gleaner combine on a patch of soybeans beneath a hillock just beyond the suburban sprawl of northwest Rochester on a recent warm Friday afternoon. “I’m not going to beat around the bush anymore. That’s what the data says.”
But as the oat mafia looks to the future, they’re struggling with a basic marketing question: Who will actually buy these oats they’re growing?
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and her daughter were among the throngs Friday as President Joe Biden delivered the apology that many Indigenous Americans thought would never come.
“I think he really said the things that people have been waiting to hear for generations, acknowledged just the horror and trauma of literally having our children stolen from our communities,” said Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “It’s a powerful first step towards healing.”
Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to assimilate to European ways. Many children were abused, and at least 973 died, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Other Minnesotans reacted similarly to Flanagan, saying they welcomed the apology but that additional action is needed to help Indigenous people move forward.
Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, wrote in a newsletter that the apology was “a welcome first step on the journey to healing.”
“There is no way to truly right historical injustices for the children buried at Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools, but these words set a new tone for the country and will help heal the anguish so many Natives have carried for so long,” Treuer wrote. “It gives me hope that we can come together to reconcile and heal our troubled nation.”
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state Senate, called Biden’s apology encouraging.
“This recognition of past wrongdoings is an important step towards healing relationships between the United States and the sovereign nations affected by these past systems,” Kunesh said in a statement. “This dark period of American history must be remembered and taught.”
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
