1,000 Farm Initiative: Ecydsis Leads with On-Farm Research

Hear from Monte Bottens, CEO of Ag Solutions Network and Bottens Family Farm, as he talks with Alex Michaels of the Ecdysis Foundation about the 1,000 Farms Initiative.

To learn more about the 1,000 Farms Initiative, visit: https://www.ecdysis.bio/featured-project
https://www.ecdysis.bio/_files/ugd/49b043_3048549b00a2416c9650d4d21005bcc0.pdf

Ecdysis Foundation started in 2016 behind the wheel of a rental car on a cross country road trip home to South Dakota. Dr. Lundgren had just been suspended from his federal position for presenting his research on the hopes of regenerative agriculture and problems of pesticide risks to farmers and the National Academy of Sciences. Driving through the endless miles where society had traded corn and soybeans for degraded rural communities, it was clear that something was deeply wrong with how science was being applied. Something had to change.

The vision that evolved became a new model of agricultural science. And the only way to implement these changes was to get out of the current scientific matrix.

​Scientists have to become farmers to increase the relevance and credibility of their research. Scientists also have become part of the farming community. Funding models have to change to remove conflicts of interest from science, and farmers needed to be intimately involved in producing scientific research. The metrics that scientists assess their success by have to be re-envisioned to incorporate outcomes that farmers care about. And scientists need to be able to communicate their science to the end users

Alex earned her Bsc Biology at USD and is pursuing her Msc Wildlife and Fisheries Science at SDSU. Alex is a master's student at South Dakota State University, researching regenerative agriculture, pollinators and birds in North Dakota and southern Manitoba, Canada. She joined Ecdysis in 2019.