Merle Jensen pioneers hydroponic food production

Calvin Bratt
Tribune editor

Merle Jensen

TUCSON -- Merle Jensen, who grew up on a diversified farm on Willey's Lake Road, sees the future of agriculture not in soil, but in greenhouses.
  Jensen, 69, and a 1957 graduate of Lynden High School, has devoted his professional life to showing just how productive a controlled environment can be for growing food.
  Since arriving at the University of Arizona in 1968, Jensen has pushed for ever farther application of the principle of hydroponics, or growing plants in a water and nutrient solution without soil.
  "As long as they've got the right light of the spectrum, these plants are happy," he explained.
  Jensen's work over the years has taken him to 65 to 70 countries, he estimates. A project in the United Arab Emirates involved growing vegetables with desalted seawater. In 15 weeks in China in 1987, he set up 3,000 acres of greenhouses -- and his instructional materials were translated into Chinese -- leading to an estimated 5 million acres of greenhouse horticulture there today.
  Jensen directed the creation of the hydroponic greenhouses at The Land Pavilion of Disney World's Epcot Center in Florida. Over 25 years, some 300 million people have passed through the exhibit to see "how their food will be grown in the future," he said.
  His mother's family operated greenhouses in the Netherlands, but Jensen, growing up, didn't expect to go to college or work with plants. A Navy stint changed his view of what he could do. After a year at Washington State University, he graduated in crop production from Cal-Poly, then went on to Cornell for his master's degree and Rutgers for his doctorate.
  When he first came to UA, Jensen worked with the Environmental Research Lab. Along the way, he became involved with the Dutch-born Eurofresh tomato-growing company that was relocating to south Arizona. Seeing an opportunity for the university, he won state funding to create the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center in the Department of Plant Sciences.
  Today, the greenhouse research center operates on a $1 million annual budget. A classroom and office building there is named after Jensen.
  Although he officially retired a few years ago, Jensen still pops in at the university on a regular basis. "I was just there this morning," he said last Wednesday. "I still work with students."
  His exotic and futuristic projects have always "generated a lot of notoriety," Jensen said. But two going on now may be as far-out as any, earning a cover story write-up in Tucson Weekly magazine last September.
  Jensen helped design the food production elements of an artificially lit growth chamber for the American research station at the South Pole. Besides producing salad herbs and vegetables, the climate-controlled chamber is an oasis for crew members living in the cold (to minus-100 degrees, dry (10 percent humity) and dark (no sunlight for six months) environment.
  "The whole mental health situation of the Pole has changed," he said.
  The other project in the works would send a mock spacecraft to the moon to start growing crops that would feed future astronauts and provide them with oxygen.
  "It's been quite a ride, this career," Jensen says.
  Merle and his wife Sharon come back to Lynden several times a year, to a home they own on Wiser Lake. He is in Whatcom County this week.
  A few years ago, Jensen's life interest came full circle when he helped set up the McPhail family west of Lynden in a fully controlled hydroponic tomato-growing operation.
  E-mail Calvin Bratt at editor@lyndentribune.com.