Michael Kantar (B.S. ’07, M.S. ’08, Ph.D. ’13) knows about improving the genes of far-flung families by studying their wild relatives. Not the human kind, but the close cousins of major crops like barley, potatoes, pumpkins, rice, rye, and wheat.

An associate professor at the University of Hawaii, Kantar identifies valuable traits of these and many other overlooked varieties. The goal? To eventually broaden farmers’ planting choices beyond today’s limited options.

“These wild relatives are so useful because they live in weird places,” says Kantar. “They tend to be extreme in their ability to respond to things. Whether that’s disease resistance or resistance to heat or flooding, by necessity they have to be able to live in wild and crazy environments.”

Kantar’s work may eventually lead to potatoes with more “climatic plasticity,” wild chili peppers being grown commercially, beans that are better adapted to local conditions, and a more robust seed industry able to support cover crops that let soils reenergize.

“If we want to have something new by 2050, we need to make decisions about breeding strategies by 2030,” says Kantar. “How can we speed up using what we know today? How do we get what people want while making sure those things are environmentally friendly and sustainable, and while getting enough food, fiber, or fuel out of the plant?”

Kantar worries that today’s agricultural status quo is failing to meet people’s changing needs—amid worrisome shifts in the environment. Current policies date back to the Depression, he says. “We’ve incentivized a system that doesn’t value ecosystems very much. If we want to start caring about sustainability, we have to look at other systems that have been proposed and used over the thousands of years of agriculture.”

His core collaborators include computer scientists, ecologists, microbiologists, and soil scientists. Thanks to Kantar’s restless imagination, this group is posing fundamental questions about modern agriculture. “Why do we set all our plants in rows and put heavy machinery through them? Let’s have computers look at different configurations,” he says. “Have we overlooked other farming methods simply because rows and machinery are convenient for humans?”

“Mikey’s a Renaissance scientist,” says Colin Khoury, senior director of science and conservation at the San Diego Botanic Garden, who has collaborated with Kantar. “He’s a big creative thinker but grounded in relevant questions for agriculturalists, farmers, and plant breeders, and that is no small task.”

A four-year Gopher tennis letter winner and captain of the U of M’s men’s team for three years, from 2005 to 2007, Kantar mastered every aspect of his solo sport. Athletics, science, and academia are all essentially performance-based disciplines, he says. “All require a lot of practice, refining techniques, and then sharing what you’ve been working on with the world.”

Being in the sciences also helped teach Kantar the value of teamwork. “The undergraduate ‘me’ would be surprised to learn that in the past decade, I’ve worked with hundreds of people in dozens of countries,” he says. “I didn’t realize that science is inherently a social process. That’s something you ignore at your own risk,” he adds.

“He’s got a smile that melts people,” notes his former adviser Paul Porter, professor emeritus in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics. “He’s incredibly collegial, and that’s the key to his success.”

Kantar’s playful curiosity also shows up in his scholarship. His paper Adapting Perennial Grain and Oilseed Crops for Climate Resiliency has a footnote that refers readers to “Seuss, D., (1960). Green Eggs and Ham. Random House.” In the famed children’s book, Sam-I-am refuses the unusually hued dish, but ultimately finds it delicious. “The paper presents a new set of models,” says Kantar. “We hoped that if we put readers in the mindset of a child, they’d be more open to trying something new.”

Other papers by Kantar quote Where the Wild Things Are and The Phantom Tollbooth. Yet another cited verses from Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid, until an editor deleted them.

“The quotes are kind of fun,” says Kantar. ‘They’re a way to distill core ideas into a more digestible chunk. They give readers a snapshot of the way the I and my coauthors thought about an issue.”

Not surprisingly, a picture of a character from The Phantom Tollbooth—Azaz, the king of Dictionopolis—adorns a wall in his office.

“The biggest thing is you have to be open,” says Kantar. “Don’t think you know all the answers. Make an honest effort to participate in different discussions.” To him, not having all the answers is a strength, not a weakness. “It’s good to be wrong. If you’re not wrong, you don’t have a chance to grow. That is at the heart of science,” he adds. “There’s an endless number of questions worth asking. Maybe I’ll get to answer some of them. Maybe I won’t, but the process of trying is worth it."

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