New networking platform available for Minnesota farmers

Mar 28, 2022

Farmmaps lets producers connect with others about individual farming practices

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

A new platform is available to Minnesota farmers looking to connect with other producers engaged in different farming practices.

The University of Minnesota Extension’s Southwest Regional Sustainable Partnership (RSDP) and Center for Integrated Natural Resources and Agricultural Management (CINRAM) recently released Farmmaps.

Farmmaps is a free and interactive online tool allowing farmers to create community, network and share case study information.

“We have restaurant maps where you can find a place that’s close by, read a little bit about it and make a decision,” Dean Current, director of CINRAM, told Farms.com. “Farmmaps operates in a similar fashion.”

The online map currently has 45 case studies on it, broken down into three categories:

Soil health (tillage, cover crops, etc.),
Silvopasture (combining pasture and trees to provide feed for cattle and opportunities for forest management), and
Snow fence (the Minnesota Department of Transportation pays producers to leave corn unharvested to prevent snow from blowing onto busy roads.)

More categories could be added in the future, Current said.

To use the map, users can click on a pinned location to learn what practices the individual farm uses and the economic and/or environmental benefits the farmers have experienced. The listings also have contact information should a producers wish to reach out to one another.

Farmmaps screenshot

Jerry and Nancy Ackermann grow corn, soybeans and alfalfa on about 1,200 acres in Lakefield, Minn. They use a blend of no-till, strip-till diversified rotation and cover crops, and their farm is among the case studies available on Farmmaps.

Since the map went live, the Ackermanns have received multiple calls from other producers interested in how they farm.

“Not everyone farms the same way, so it’s great when we’re able to share ideas from one another,” Jerry told Farms.com. “After I’ve given people my recommendations, I tell them to use the app and search out three or four other people.”

And giving farmers the opportunity to speak with one another independently removes bias.

Farmers seeking out information from other places may be getting information that fits what a specific organization is doing.

But communicating farmer-to-farmer ensures producers are receiving honest information, Ackermann said.

“If you go to your local co-op and say you’re thinking about doing strip-till, well the co-op is selling fertilizer so they’re going to push what they sell,” he said. “With the map, you’re talking to people who aren’t selling anything. You’re talking to them about what they’re doing and what they’ve discovered along the way.”

Ackermann, for example, strip-tilled his corn for the last 25 years but last year decided to no-till his corn.

Speaking to fellow producers about no-till gave him the confidence to try it, he said.

“I learned what they did and why, and that gave me the courage to try,” he said. “We had some of the best yields we ever had.”

Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”