From the field to the classroom to the garden, Richard Rust devoted his life to the soil.
Rust, a former professor of soil science at the University of Minnesota, surveyed the state's land and developed a groundbreaking way of growing food from it. He died Aug. 19 at the age of 94.
Born in 1921 in rural Bunker Hill, Ill., and educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Rust was one of 10 children — and the first in his family to give up the farming life to become an academic. But he never left agriculture far behind.
After serving as an Army Air Corps pilot in England during World War II, Rust earned a doctorate from the University of Illinois, and joined the Department of Soil, Water and Climate at the University of Minnesota in 1956.
At the U, he served as the liaison between the state of Minnesota and the federal government on a widespread survey of the nation's soil, a survey that's still used today as a reference. It analyzed how soils differ across the state, affecting how they are managed for uses such as agriculture and road-building.
That work later led Rust, with student Pierre Robert, to develop the framework for "precision agriculture," a concept that has transformed modern agriculture and conservation, colleagues say.
Fields had long been treated with fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides in a one-size-fits-all manner. But Rust believed that considering the soil's properties in different areas of a single field — how much water it could hold or how dense the weeds were — could help farmers maximize crop yield without over-treating crops with fertilizer and pesticides.
Precision agriculture practices helped farmers, while also reducing the effect of agriculture on water quality — "a win-win situation," said Ed Nater, a longtime colleague and soil science professor at the U.