Jason Rowntree is a professor of Animal Science at Michigan State University, where he holds the Charles Stewart Mott Distinguished Professorship for Sustainable Agriculture. Rowntree also serves as a co-lead for the Metrics, Management and Monitoring (3M) project.
The five-year, $19 million project has marshaled the research capacity of 11 nonprofit organizations, private research organizations and public universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. This project is gathering data across 60 ranches covering 1.69 million acres of land in Oklahoma, Texas, Michigan, Colorado and Wyoming.
Q: How did you get started in your field of research?
A: I wanted to be an ag teacher. When I was young, my ag teacher was so instrumental in my life. I just knew I wanted to have the same impact on young people. And Texas FFA was hugely important in shaping me.
But in college, I enjoyed my animal science classes more than my ag education classes. The final nail in the coffin was when I started doing my shadowing in a high school ag program and realized I probably didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to teach high school ag. After that, I gravitated toward doing more livestock and cattle research and just really found a good niche there, and I’ve been doing it ever since.
Q: What are you working on right now, and how will it help producers?
A: More than ever, I engage supply chain players. Often, these are younger professionals with sustainability backgrounds. I’ve gotten a lot of satisfaction and feel like I’m having an impact by helping them understand animal science and animal production. I feel like that voice is very much needed today in our supply chains.
The type of work I do, I’m outnumbered one to 50 from a science perspective when you look at the impact that science tends to have on policy, NGOs and supply chains. And the fact is there is another side of the story that doesn’t get told. There is so much opportunity to enhance resilience and beef production. Beef cattle aren’t the climate villain they are often portrayed as in the public landscape.
Q: What is innovative or unique about your research?
A: I’ve become very interested in the carbon assessment of beef. I started a long time ago looking at life cycle assessments of beef. To my knowledge, our work was the first that tried to include soil carbon sequestration and improvements into beef-focused literature.
There’s a lot of nuance there, a lot of variation. You can have ranches that are doing a very good job of building carbon. If we account for improved ecological function, it can — without question — lower beef’s environmental footprint considerably.
We need to have high productivity systems, but we need to take care of the land as we go. And I feel like if I could hang my hat on anything in my career, it’s probably trying to lead that more nuanced debate.
Q: Who are you inspired by professionally, and why?
A: I had men like Dr. Richard Teague who were mentors for me. And farmers like Gabe Brown, Will Harris, Allen Williams and others who were highly impactful in mentoring me on that landscape management side. Allan Savory, too. He pushed the concept of context, that a goal is something to aspire to, but land management is about context — wants and needs for the land and as a family. If we could all move forward in creating more human context for our natural systems, we would be in much better shape.
Q: What do you love most about your work?
A: I love the production of beef. I’m passionate about cows grazing on healthy grasslands, and I’m passionate about healthy and faithful families and communities. And the fact that we can create a project like the 3M project that has 80 people working on it, not to mention the producers we engage and the organizations we talk to. It’s what gets me out of bed every morning, and it is what excites me about our future.
I’m probably an in-the-closet hippie a little bit. I love trout streams, and I love healthy, high-quality waters, and I want to see those waters vibrant for my grandchildren. I don’t want to see them sucked dry because of irrigation or manure or runoff or whatever. But simultaneously, we have to feed a lot of people. So you can’t just attack a system. Every system is useful. Every system has context. What we have to do is find the problems and do our best to fill those gaps with research and science and address them in a way that we can all move forward in a healthful, regenerative way.
Laura Brenner
Laura Brenner, Sr. Content Writer
Laura Brenner is a senior content writer for Noble Research Institute. She’s worked in agricultural communications for over a decade, specializing in nonprofit communications and storytelling. Laura earned a bachelor’s degree from Penn State University and a master’s degree from Purdue University. She resides near her hometown of Lancaster County in south-central Pennsylvania.
