COMFREY — Sherry Arndt’s father was an innovator. She stressed that in a brief address Friday to faculty, staff and supporters of Minnesota State University. The crowd was there celebrating her donation of about 160 acres of farmland to the university.
“My parents bought this farm, 320 acres, back in 1935 when they were newly married,” Arndt said, adding that the donation was a fitting memorial to her father’s legacy as Friday was her late father’s birthday. Arndt wanted to donate the land to MSU to help keep that spirit, that legacy, of innovation alive on her father’s land.
Sixty acres of the land will be used by the School of Applied Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, according to MSU. It’s a donation that should help shape research into agriculture in southern Minnesota.
“We have a number of faculty that deal a lot with soil health (and) with regenerative agricultural practices,” said Aaron Budge, the interim executive director of the school. “We’re hoping to be able to try some of those practices and/or show the benefits of such practices moving forward. So that we can show the regional farming community these are some things that really work.”
Budge said the school plans to partner with a third party to help take care of the land and facilitate the research on it, and that once that’s set up, the hope is to be able to start using the land this spring.
“We don’t have the ability to actually run the property itself. So we’ll likely end up leasing this space to some local interests, but they’ll work closely with the faculty (and) with the students to be able to say, ‘These are some of the things that we want to happen in this particular section,’” he said.
The other 100 acres of the land will be sold, with the proceeds going toward scholarships to MSU’s School of Nursing — which Arndt graduated from in 1970. She said her memories of MSU and her time in the program was a big driver behind wanting to help out now.
“I had a lot of fun (at MSU). I was only 17 when I graduated from high school, and at that time schools of nursing were largely based in hospitals, and they were three-year programs. I thought, ‘Well, I can go to a four-year, get my bachelor’s degree and I’ll still be the same age as most of my peers,” Arndt said. “And, of course, I thought going to college sounded like a lot of fun. … The fun was always part of the motive, I have to admit.”
Following her graduation, Arndt went to California to become a forensic nurse, one of the very first in the country.
“I moved out to California and got a job in a program that was brand new, starting to use nurses to do the medical legal exams on sexual assault victims,” Arndt said. “There were only five programs in the whole country, and our county was the first in California, and now there are nurse examiners in all 50 states.”
Arndt’s donation was the first one made through the new Maverick Real Estate Foundation, which seeks to secure real estate to help further the college’s mission.
“Our Maverick Real Estate Foundation is a subsidiary of our Minnesota State University medical foundation; and really what they saw (was) a need to be able to hold real estate for the purpose of helping the university,” said Amy Cooney, vice president for university advancement at MSU.
Both Budge and Arndt hope the research done on the land will help advance agricultural practices and keep that innovative spirit of Arndt’s father alive and well on the property. To her, that’s the only way forward.
“It’s the key to the future: innovation,” Arndt said. “The school of ag, I think, is going to do some interesting things … and I just think that’s so cool.”