Loni Kemp has focused her time and talents on the issues of sustainable agriculture and water quality for three decades on staff at the Minnesota Project. During these decades, she and her husband Dick (Nethercut) built a beautiful hilltop home near Canton, Minnesota, created a time-tested prolific garden and small orchard, and raised two beautiful daughters, Laura and Sara. Although Loni Kemp’s reputation precedes her in Washington DC where she is asked to testify in the Senate Ag Committee or other important sessions, her reputation as a gardener and community member in Harmony and Canton and parts of Southeast Minnesota grows just as large. Her voice with its deep connection to farm policy will be missed at the Minnesota Project.  

At the Minnesota Project, Loni’s work over the past several years has focused on national policy and the sometimes thankless job of trying to shepherd pieces of legislation through the Farm Bills. She has worked with several national coalitions, including the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture (where she was a founder) and the Sustainable Agriculture Working Groups throughout the nation. Loni’s ability to articulate policy options or strategies has been well known and has helped to change minds and hearts, especially when it came to setting stewardship goals through the Conservation Security Program. She has held the vision that it is possible to use existing policy options and turn them toward higher and better stewardship of the land, rewarding farmers in the process. Since the winter of 1998, Loni Kemp wrote for every issue of the organization’s newsletter, Community Connections. Her regular column, “A View from the Woods” has always been a grounded perspective from her greening garden or snowy hilltop in the woods of southeast Minnesota. Readers have turned to it for an honest look at life, parenting, gardening, or farm policy wrapped up in the truth of community.

We wish to thank Loni for everything she has contributed to, and accomplished, on behalf of the Minnesota Project over the past three decades. Looking forward, we wish her only the best and every possible success in whatever she does: in life, in gardening, and in her pursuit of a better world befitting the phrase she often used, “profitable farms that protect the environment.”