Remembering Fred Kirschenmann, 1935–2025
We’ve lost a giant in the food systems world.
Fred Kirschenmann, 90, died on September 13, 2025, after a nine-month stay in hospice for advanced prostate cancer. In his final days, he was surrounded by family and friends.
While Fred was a good friend of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, he will certainly be remembered worldwide as a national and international leader in the sustainable agriculture movement, as a former director (and more recently, Distinguished Fellow) at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, and as board president of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in New York. He was also a pioneering organic farmer, a North Dakota rancher, a professor, a prolific writer, a philosopher, a champion of agricultural resilience, and an eloquent advocate for soil health.
Fred was an early inspiration for the Center because in 1976 he converted his own family farm and began using sustainable practices such as crop rotation and certified organic, and he did not use any fertilizers or pesticides. “Fred was a leader in rethinking agriculture and advocating for goals of resilience and renewal in agriculture,” says Polly Walker, a co-founder of the Center.
At the Center, we’ve appreciated everything Fred did for the food systems change movement. “He was a trusted colleague and true source of wisdom, pragmatism, and hope for the sustainable agriculture movement,” says director Shawn McKenzie. “Our collaboration with Fred began soon after our Center’s founding. He was an early and steadfast ally who possessed expertise and insight outside of what CLF initially brought to the table as an academic center based within a school of public health. Fred embraced interdisciplinary approaches and understood the essential role that public health has to play in making positive change in food systems. His many contributions continue to inform and elevate our work to this day.”
“I can best capture Fred as a person by describing his first visit to the CLF,” recalls Bob Lawrence, founding director of the Center. “While negotiating the details of his travel arrangements, I asked whether he preferred to stay at a hotel or use our guest room. He promptly said, ‘I’d prefer to stay at your home.’ That was the first of a series of visits to our home over the decades. Then, when I was driving him to BWI at the end of his first visit, his cellphone rang. Before answering, Fred turned and said, ‘I’m sorry, I need to take this.’ The call was from his farm manager, and I eavesdropped on a negotiation for Fred to sell his entire crop of organic flax seed to a European grain merchant. He signed off, picked up conversation, and answered my questions about what had just transpired. In this and many other things, Fred was our entry into areas of the food system that enhanced CLF’s work. His friendship and wisdom are irreplaceable.”
Seventeen years ago, in 2008, the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production in America published a report, “Putting Meat on the Table.” Fred was one of the commissioners on that project, and he wrote the final chapter of the report, an essay titled, “Toward Sustainable Agriculture,” (page 50 of the report). (The Pew Commission was a joint project of The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health based within the CLF.)
“Fred was the heart and soul of the Pew Commission,” says Bob Martin, Executive Director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, former policy director and current senior adviser at the Center. “He was asked to draft something up for a system without CAFO production. What he drafted was so excellent that the Commissioners made no edits, and for a bunch of academics and former politicians, that was unusual. It was printed in the final report just as he had originally drafted it.”
Kirschenmann begins the essay by citing Jared Diamond, writer of the 2005 publication, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, in which he warns that civilizations that do not look ahead to anticipate challenges inevitably collapse. By a parallel logic, Fred predicts that the current industrial agricultural model is bound to fail. The end of cheap energy, the instability of climate, and water scarcity, he argues, will be the death knell for the industrial model. He then makes a strong case for strong soil management practices to carry us from an industrial economy to an ecological economy.
Tom Philpott, a senior research associate at the Center, says, “I’ll never forget the influence Fred had on my career and thinking. He was the model of the farmer-intellectual, with one eye trained on the soil of his organic farm in North Dakota, and the other on the machinations, dysfunctions, and better possibilities embedded in the global food system. His underlying message: biodiversity is just as important on farmland as it is in wild land; and that food systems work better when power is distributed across supply chains and not concentrated in the hands of corporations answering to the profit demands of wealthy shareholders. If we are lucky enough to save our farmland from rampant erosion, agrichemical pollution, aquifer overdraft, and climate-related insults over the next half century, it will be in no small part because ag policymakers finally took heed to Fred’s insights.”
In 2005 article, Philpott wrote, “Under Kirschenmann the Leopold Center bluntly criticized and rigorously documented the environmental and social calamities being wrought by industrial agriculture.”
In a 2020 Civil Eats article, in which Fred is referred to as an elder statesman of sustainable ag, he emphasizes that “bringing soil back to life” should be the main concern of every farmer. “The biggest issue right now is that we need to make a cultural shift,” he says.
At the Center, we remain truly grateful for all that Fred did for us, for farmers, for agriculture, for food systems, and for the planet.
He will be missed by many and all who knew him.