Jill grew up on a farm along the Manitoba border in northwest Minnesota. As the oldest of four kids, her gender wasn’t a factor; she pretty much did everything any of the local eldest farm boys were expected to do.

The physical nature of farm life suited her well, but mostly what Jill valued was time outdoors in what felt to be a vast, natural world around her. This experience is etched in her bones: the smell of freshly turned dirt or just-cut crops, the animals up close in the woods and fields, and the endless reveal of bugs and other creatures in the soil.

Growing up connected to her environment in ways that are hard to describe, Jill watched agriculture take a turn. Her father, both a farmer and an agronomist working with farmers, was an integral part of it. What started out as a promise to help farmers become more profitable became a diversion into a farming paradigm that forgot about the exquisite design of nature. Even though her father always had an answer to the concerning things she was seeing, Jill recognized this approach was leaving out too many variables. Fast forward decades years later, and this fact is starkly obvious.

Today, Jill works alongside her husband, Randy, a few Amish hands, and a teenage neighbor girl on 40 acres of woods and fields near Bemidji, MN growing produce for area farmer’s markets, the local coop, and Minnesota’s Farm to School program. They also have the privilege of advising and mentoring a budding gardening program at the Northwestern Minnesota Juvenile Center.

“Farming now is not the farming I remember. Things have changed drastically in such a short time. Our soils are degraded after decades of considering the land and growing our community’s food an industrial process, just another factory in the industrial revolution,” Jill explains. “Except that this model doesn’t work with living soil. Growing healthy food only works when the soil is alive with the bizillion of organisms nature has intelligently placed there; chemical processes and exchanges happening well beyond our current understanding. A miracle, really.”

“It’s a great honor to be a part of the team at Soil Health Academy. I feel it is a privilege to work on behalf of farmers, ranchers, and a growing public demand to restore our depleted soils and bring health back to the land, its creatures, our families, and the communities we call home.” – Jill Pederson