Mike Gretzinger - Farming Smarter Feature

It takes a creative mind to break the mold - and Mike Gretzinger certainly has the creativity to do that.

Mike Gretzinger is the Agronomy Manager at Farming Smarter. He handles the relationships with research partners and coordinates all the work necessary for the non-profit charity's grant-funded projects.

He enjoys blending the creative thinking required for innovative projects with the practical application of field work. Getting to tie everything together and share it with farmers is the cherry on top for Mike.

Born and raised in Lethbridge, Alberta, Mike never expected to have a career in agriculture. Growing up, back in the 90’s, he would occasionally visit his grandparent’s farm – often riding along on the tractor with his grandpa. When the family farm was mostly sold during his early years, he never figured that agriculture would eventually become his career for a decade and counting.

Finding a path

As a biochemistry student at the University of Lethbridge, Mike wasn’t sure what he wanted to do when he graduated. Most of his friends in the program strived to become doctors and working professionals – a prospect that didn’t allure Mike’s sense of knowledge.

Ironically, he initially wasn’t interested in science research. “My friend Mike’s dad was actually Dr. Bob Blackshaw, who worked at the [Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada] Lethbridge Research Station. My friends worked there a few summers, but honestly, at first, I was kind of hesitant to it – research sounded boring to me when I was in university,” he laughs. But the longer he worked in proximity to it, the more appealing research became.

Mike narrowly navigated the difficult balancing act of finding a career that followed his interests yet didn’t require him to change directions in school. “I didn’t want to take an extra year of school and I love being outdoors, which steered me towards environmental sciences. That came with its own challenge of finding something that wasn’t oil and gas,” he recalls. Fortunately, this challenge was quickly overcome.

While searching through co-op positions at the University of Lethbridge, Mike found an opportunity to spend a summer working on the Watershed Evaluation Beneficial Management Practices [WEBs] program with Dr. Jim Miller. This opportunity became a major turning point in Mike’s career trajectory.

“We did a lot of work inside the lab and outside, visiting riparian areas. It was an awesome summer, and I remember thinking, ‘I could see myself doing something like this,’” Mike reflects.

The next year, Mike applied to work on a crew led by Dr. James Tansey and the late Dr. Lloyd Dosdall that continued to develop his interest in agriculture.

“For this I was working in canola plots sampling cabbage seedpod weevil and flea beetles for all the grad study work from UofA. I wasn’t super involved in the background and methodology at the time, but I was really fascinated by what they were doing and why.” This fascination would lead Mike to take the final step that confirmed the direction he wanted to take his career.

As an ultimate example of serendipity, “there was one day in September, Jim couldn’t make it back to Lethbridge, so I got to fly up in an ultralight plane and hang a sweep net out the window to see how high up the cabbage seedpod weevil could fly.” It turned out later that that farm was the original SARA research site he still works at!

When he returned to school that fall, Mike enrolled in a research paper’s course. “It sounded like a really different kind of class and it focused on neotropical ecology, so I figured I would give it a try.”

“Each week of the semester, the class would read a different research paper and dissect it. Methodically, they would master their understanding of how a research paper was built and what it was trying to achieve.

Being challenged to think differently gave Mike a new appreciation for research. By the end of the class, Mike was ready to make a of it, “I kind of did a complete 180 – I’d gone from thinking that research sounded like a super boring career to realizing that it’s actually super interesting.”

After graduation in 2008, Mike took a local job at Maple Leaf Pork, doing quality testing in from the barn all the way through to the packaging departments. “It was a pretty cool experience, but I really wanted to pursue something more in line with Agriculture.”

So, at AgExpo in 2010, Mike met Chris Procyk at the Farming Smarter (then Southern Applied Research Association) booth and was hired soon after.

Building the Job You Want

Farming Smarter was very similar to what it is now with constant fieldwork throughout the summer. Only now it’s a portion of the staff in the field opposed to the entirety of it.

“Back at the start, my role was really the same as the students do now. At the time we had about 20 or so projects and a bunch of demos, compared to the 100-plus we have now. I did most of the herbicide applications and mixing for the handful of spray trials, which was kind of new to me but a lot of fun to learn how to do,” says Mike.

Back then, Mike often worked in the field directly alongside Chris and Ken Coles, learning the skills that he now trains summer students on each year.

In the early days of Farming Smarter, making a lot out of a little was critical. “We had to have this jack-of-all-trades mentality and really leverage the resources we did have and use them not only effectively but incredibly efficiently. So, it was important that we all knew how to run the equipment and how to fix it.”

As Mike proudly testifies, “we got by with what we had, we made it work, and then it was continual improvement.”

Now, a decade later, he’s always astonished at how much he and the organization have grown when he stops to reflect on his career at Farming Smarter.

“We expanded a little bit of what we were doing and who we were working with each year, and the scope of the work as well,” Mike explains before diving into an example. “When I started, we had our bike sprayer, and that worked good for maybe a thousand plots or so. But we were doing two passes on each rep and thought it would be nice to do it in just one pass, so we built a slightly bigger sprayer, and added an electric motor to it too! And then the iterative growth cycle takes off from there.”

“Whenever there were program cuts throughout the industry, it would open up big gaps and holes that we’ve done our best to fill. There were a lot of opportunities for us – both from ideas that we sought out and from private companies coming forward with research ideas for us.”

As the operation at Farming Smarter grew and roles shifted around to fill new needs and accommodate strengths, Mike began to take over the project management side of research. “We got to a point where we really needed to find ways to separate the work – Lewis came on doing a lot of the field scale and GIS stuff, and we really needed to expand again.” This reorganization saw Mike begin to grow his role as Agronomy Manager.

“I’m super proud when I look back – we've done so many awesome things,” Mike states.

Onwards, to the Future!

Mike shows no signs of slowing down, certainly not as Farming Smarter continues to expand its research repertoire. In fact, he’s eager to see how many of his ideas for future research will receive funding in the next couple of years.

“We’re at this intersection of a bunch of projects that are starting to come together that would allow us to pair projects together and create, essentially, a decision tree for farmers. I think there is some really cool work we could do there that I’m excited about,” Mike comments.

While he waits for his master plan to culminate, Mike looks forward to finding new opportunities to keep his mind creative and engaged.

Mike lives in Lethbridge with family who stay active, routinely going on adventures in the summer; be it camping, biking, hiking, or enjoying a round of golf (either with clubs or with discs, it matters not). Otherwise, Mike can often be found tinkering or creating on any kind of weird craft he can find – like a rock-climbing wall in his basement, or a disc golf course around the fields at Farming Smarter.

To learn more about Mike and his work at Farming Smarter, get in touch with him.