The title “genius” is a bit daunting, but it’s truly fitting for landscape ecologist Lisa Schulte Moore PhD’02, who won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, or “genius grant,” in 2021 — a $625,000 investment in the future of her work. Moore is currently a professor in the Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management at Iowa State University, where she works closely with farmers to design sustainable and resilient agricultural systems. For example, Moore helped create the STRIPS program: Science-Based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairie Strips. Strips of native perennial prairie vegetation are embedded into crop fields to optimize slow water movement off fields and prevent soil and nutrient loss. During a visit to the UW this year, she shared her journey from western Wisconsin to pioneering research at the intersection of agriculture and ecology.
Tell us about your roots. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and attended Eau Claire North High School. My family has deep ties to the area — we have a family farm just south of Eau Claire, near Allen, Wisconsin. When I was a child, my great-grandmother lived there, and it was a working dairy farm. My great-uncles operated it, and both my grandparents on my maternal side were dairy farmers. But the eighties hit, and both my great uncles lost those farms. Just part of that farm crisis.
That must have been incredibly traumatic.
Very traumatic. When my folks were taking a country drive in the early 2000s, they found the home site [and] the home acres for sale — 40 acres — so they bought that property and expanded a little bit over time. It is such a special place in the family.
How has that family farm influenced your work?
It has really helped me understand the farmers that I work with, that strong connection to place in a way that I don’t think I would fully appreciate if we didn’t have that family farm.
You’ve compared yourself as a scientist to a jazz musician playing in a band. Why is that?
I say it as a jazz artist because I am a collaborator. I don’t do any sole investigator studies, and I’m collaborating with people that are in very different fields. It could be agronomy, it could be economics, it could be hydrology, all sorts of different engineering fields, sometimes artists. So it’s kind of musicians in a band, and I love it when we come together, and we start riffing off somebody else’s theme. That is the absolute best time as a scientist. You carry the melody for a little while, and then it’s like you start to peter out on the questions or something, but then somebody else gets the spark and they take it to the next level. And that’s my happy place.
What’s your favorite aspect of your work?
I really love working with farmers on their land. Being able to do science on farmers’ fields is my favorite thing. I’ve developed really wonderful rapport with a bunch of farmers, and I feel such honor that they’re willing to let me and my students and collaborators onto their land to investigate some really important science questions. And it’s just tickling to me to think that they’re interested in the science results. They’re experts in their own field, but it’s so cool when they want to contribute to and learn about the science and allow investigators onto their farm.
Can you tell us about some of your current projects?
I’m currently involved in three major projects. The STRIPS project is looking at prairie strips on commercial farms and understanding how they’re providing benefits on farmers’ fields and interacting with the crop. There is another project we’re calling Grass to Gas, which looks at the potential to harvest the material from the prairie strip. The third project is called Horizon Two, and I’m actually working with a commercial partner, Roeslein Alternative Energy, that’s the lead on this. It’s one of the USDA Climate-Smart Commodities grants, so it’s an $80 million grant. It’s a big one. It’s basically taking that Grass to Gas idea and actually running a commercial pilot around it. So we’re not just doing it in laboratory or university farm or the model space; we’re actually doing it on the fields and working with farmers to put on the prairie and working with farmers to transition their cropping system to work in a winter crop and study.
How did winning the MacArthur Fellowship impact your career?
[It was] hugely validating in that way and in my approach to follow my intuition into different areas of science. I left the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a forester, and now I’m an agricultural person, so I really shifted career trajectories, and most people stick in the same path, so [this was] hugely validating in that way. But how did it change my life? Well, immediately my inbox filled up and just the demands on my time got huge. That was hard for me. Time management is always hard, but part of what I’ve prided myself in has been my accessibility, certainly to students and collaborators and the farmers, and even some in my role in the Bioeconomy Institute [helping] people from industry looking for science advice, and I can’t do that anymore. It’s just like there’s just not enough of me, and it took me a while to come to terms with that I couldn’t be as giving with my time as I had been.
What advice do you have for budding scientists?
There are just so many cool things that you can do with your life. There are going to be challenges along the way, as well. Everybody has them. Even people that seem like they have it all put together and are super successful, I promise you they have challenges. But one thing I always tell students is [to] lean into that challenge that you have right now, and if you lean into it, you’ll figure it out and overcome that barrier. And there’s going to be more challenges. [In] each career stage, you face new challenges, but the challenges that you’ve overcome prepare you for the next ones. It gives you wisdom, it gives you confidence, it gives you broader networks of support. So lean into the challenges and proceed with confidence, and have fun!
