As a teenager, Peter Hartman had the opportunity to live on a Wisconsin dairy farm for several summers and work with the Youth Conservation Core in Northern Wisconsin. Peter attended UW Milwaukee where he earned undergraduate degrees in Botany, Zoology and Chemistry. An advertisement for jobs in soil conservation led him to UW Madison where he took soil and conservation engineering classes. Peter was inspired by soil and the five soil forming factors: parent material, climate, biota, topography and time. Soil tied together his love for geology, plants, landforms, and earth history. Peter became a Soil Scientist and a soil mapper for years, first in Indiana then in Minnesota with a mapping detail in Florida. He mapped over a million acres. Peter then became an Area Resource Soil Scientist in Rochester, MN for NRCS. That job gave him the opportunity to dig into soils even deeper and work with engineers on soil conservation projects. This opportunity got Peter involved in Soil Health and opened his eyes to the damage conventional farming practices are doing to our environment. Peter briefly retired, but then did a contracted NRCS project: an ecological site description project on bluff prairies in the Driftless Area. Peter retired again from NRCS over ten years ago and now spends a lot of his time with his family, volunteering, and studying the world and our place in it. For Peter, it has been a great joy to be a volunteer with The Prairie Enthusiasts. The good work The Prairie Enthusiasts does is his motivation. He is thrilled by all the things he has learned about fire ecology and loves spending time in the natural areas we are preserving.
