FAIRBANKS - Charlie Knight (aka “Mr. Agriculture”) could just sit back in his recliner, wrap himself in his John Deere fleece blanket, and take it easy now that he is retired.

But that would be so un-Charlie like.

“I’ve got too many hobbies,” Knight said. “That’s the reason I retired.” His latest retirement was from the post of northern region manager for the state Division of Agriculture.

Along with fishing and hunting, Knight, 64, likes gardening and beekeeping. His passion, though, is cultivating wild berries, particularly lingonberries and blueberries.

“There has been very little research on Alaska berries,” Knight said. “My goal is to domesticate them and find the best wild berries in Alaska and move them to my land gradually where they can be mechanically harvested.”

It’s a fairly daunting proposal. He visits sites all around the Interior to determine where the best berries are, judging things like how high off the ground the berries are and how many berries are in each cluster.

Knight, at his three-acre farm near Eielson Air Force Base, has already accumulated 56 varieties of berries and fruits, including gooseberries, red and black currants, sea berries, Saskatoon berries, cherries, high-bush cranberries, chokecherries and rhubarb. In spite of all the work he has done to get to this point, the moose seem to think the farm is for their dining enjoyment.

Raised on a 280-acre farm in Kansas and in the little town of Beeler, Knight grew up immersed in agriculture. He headed off to Kansas State University with a goal of learning how to be a farm manager. “Everyone was saying back then that by the year 2000 the world would be overpopulated and there would not be enough food,” he said. “I thought that the person who knew how to grow food would always get to eat.”

Knight earned a bachelor’s degree in agronomy and then a master’s, researching nitrate pollution of groundwater from fertilizers. The very day he finished his degree, his adviser told him a former professor of Knight’s who had traveled all over Kansas gathering corn samples was now in Alaska and needed a technician.

Knight arrived at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1971, right after marrying his college sweetheart, Becky. After a couple of years, Knight was enticed back to Kansas because university salaries had not kept pace with inflation caused by the pipeline construction.

A few years later when the Delta Agricultural Project needed an agronomist, Knight said he “loaded up the trailer and came back.”

With 60,000 acres of farmland to develop, the project was a huge endeavor for the state and the university.

“It was an interesting time,” Knight said. “The pipeline was flowing full. There was all kinds of grant money.”

With some of those funds Knight helped start a university experiment farm in Delta Junction and managed research plots in Delta, Palmer and Fairbanks. He also began working on a doctorate, studying the fate of urea fertilizer in sub-Arctic agricultural soils.

After earning his doctorate, Knight began teaching and continued researching fertilizer rates, minimum tillage and evaluations of alternative crops for Alaska.

In 2001 he retired from UAF and joined the Division of Agriculture, helping farmers plan how to export products such as potatoes, peonies and willows and working with the pest program.

One of the most difficult challenges is simply defining agriculture, Knight said. “The borough, the state, the USDA, all have different definitions. Most say it’s the production of food and fiber.

“But Alaska has a lot of screwy laws.”

Nevertheless, Knight can let go of that struggle and concentrate on enjoying retirement. Fairbanks will remain home for the Knights, who plan to travel a bit in the winter to visit their children, Doug and Amy. “In the summertime I will play with my berries and swat the moose away from them,” Knight said.

This column is provided as a service by the UAF School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences and the Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station. Nancy Tarnai is the school and station’s public information officer. She can be reached at ntarnai@alaska.edu.