Outgoing Rodale Institute CEO Jeff Moyer was 20 years old, fresh out of forestry school and looking for a way to remain in Pennsylvania to be near his girlfriend Gretchen, now his wife of 45 years.
The year was 1975.
“The only job I could find in forestry was in Colorado,” said Moyer, who retires this month following 47 years with Rodale, most of it logged at the Kutztown-based nonprofit education and research farm.
Moyer’s mom had spotted an ad in the Morning Call newspaper that would chart the course of his professional career. Rodale Press, the for-profit sister of the institute, was looking for a greenhouse worker.
The rest is history, he said.
“And she said, ‘You like to grow things. Why don’t you apply?’”
As fate would have it, the person interviewing him was an alumnus of the same small school Moyer had attended in the New York Adirondacks, Paul Smith’s College.
That might not have totally sealed the deal, Moyer said, but it probably didn’t hurt.
“I got the job and literally have been here ever since.”
Initially growing vegetables at the Rodale family’s original 63-acre homestead in Emmaus, Pennsylvania — once called the “Old Farm,” now known as Founders Farm — Moyer was asked a few years in to help the institute with an amaranth research project.
“They were having trouble doing it here because it would cross-pollinate with other stuff that they were working on,” he said.
Apparently, Moyer met the task well, he said, because Dick Harwood, the institute’s chief scientist at the time, asked him to come to the nonprofit to work on its research plots.
“So, I transferred here to what we call now our main campus,” he said.
That was around the time the Rodale Institute was beginning what has become the longest-running comparison of organic and conventional grain cropping systems in America, the Farming Systems Trial.
Since then, Moyer has enjoyed more than a bird’s-eye view of an agriculture sector that has catapulted from a fringe movement to a nearly $60 billion industry and, if the Rodale Institute has anything to say about it, farming as usual for the way food is grown in the future.
“I fell in love with organic agriculture and the whole concept,” Moyer said. “My wife and I were sort of caught up in the back-to-the-land movement, and we bought a piece of land that we could farm on. We built our own house, and we still live there.”
Source: lancasterfarming.com
Photo Credit: Rodale Institute
Categories: Pennsylvania, Business, Education