Careers in Agriculture: Passion for results, wheat improvement drive wheat researcher

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A bottle of Windex led Jessica Rutkoski from a high school in rural Wisconsin to working on crop research and improvement around the globe and back to Midwest wheat fields.

“There was someone at a career fair at my high school and they worked for S.C. Johnson. They had Windex on their table and they said they were on the team that developed it,” she said.

That statement sparked Rutkoski’s interest.

“I thought I would love to develop products that people use, that would be so cool,” she said.

Today, Rutkoski is an assistant professor of small grains breeding as well as a small grains breeder and quantitative geneticist at the University of Illinois at Champaign.

As a student at Waterford Union High School in southeastern Wisconsin, Rutkoski had an interest in science.

“I was always interested in science. I got really interested in biology and I really liked biochemistry,” she said.

Crop research wasn’t anywhere on her radar.

“I didn’t have an ag background at all. My family is originally from California and we moved to Wisconsin when I was little. We lived in a small town and we were really outdoorsy so I spent a lot of time on the river and outside,” she said.

When she started classes at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Rutkoski focused on pharmaceutical work and got the feel of the day-to-day running of a laboratory — something that proved not to be her cup of tea exactly.

“I got into a lab in my freshman year, just doing dishes and feeding mice and stuff and I got to see what the day-to-day work was like. Being an outdoors person, I just really couldn’t handle being indoors in a lab all the time,” she said.

Rutkoski started to look around for other options and read several articles on agriculture crop research. That led her to the lab of Professor Bill Tracy, who specialized in sweet corn breeding.

It was a summer job pollinating sweet corn that sealed the deal for Rutkoski.

“They said do you want to work in the field this summer, pollinating? I said I would really love that and they said are you sure? Are you really sure? I said yes. I did that and I really, really enjoyed it. After that experience, I changed my major to genetics,” she said.

Rutkoski went on to Cornell University’s doctorate program after graduating from Wisconsin.

At Cornell, her interest in wheat research started when she found out about an adviser’s work on wheat stem rust. That work matched with her wish to work on a product that people use.

“I was open-minded, but I ended up with wheat because that project was so internationally focused,” she said.

The status of wheat as a crop — being globally important, but not having the star power of corn or soybeans — also attracted her to the staple crop.

“I wanted to do something different, besides corn. I like being the underdog. I wanted to work on something that maybe not everybody else works on and that has some more challenges to address,” she said.

After she earned her doctorate at Cornell, Rutkoski stayed on as an assistant professor and had the opportunity to live and work in Mexico, conducting research at CIMMYT, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in El Batán, Mexico.

“That is something I always wanted to do because that is Norman Borlaug’s breeding program. If you work on wheat in breeding, it’s the best that you can get,” she said.

From Mexico, Rutkoski traveled to the Philippines where she worked on improving rice breeding methods and analysis at the International Rice Research Institute.

When she moved to the Philippines, Rutkoski had a traveling — and life — companion. She met her future husband, Juan Arbelaez, while the two were students at Cornell.

Rutkoski’s adviser alerted her to the position that was open at the U of I.

“I wanted to be careful because you don’t want to jump into something that will be hard to continue. That’s always a concern, when you inherit a breeding program, you don’t want to inherit something that is going to be difficult to maintain because there’s no funding, so I was really hesitant,” she said.

But the reputation of the small grains program at the U of I, as well as being able to be back in the Midwest, convinced her and Rutkoski took over in 2019.

Arbelaez was hired at the same time and the wife-and-husband team head up the small grains program at the U of I, with Arbelaez focusing on oat breeding.

Rutkoski’s job as a wheat researcher involves a combination of supervising, planning and doing.

“The applied breeding program entails making all the selection decisions, managing the people that are involved in carrying out the day-to-day work, making selection decisions such as what lines to cross and what lines to advance and just being on top of all of the ongoing activities to make sure they are being carried out,” she said.

Rutkoski also is able to spend plenty of time in the field.

“I have fieldwork, collecting data, I design all the trials, I help out when it comes to planting and harvesting,” she said.

Wheat keeps things interesting for Rutkoski because there is always something going on with the cereal grain.

“I feel like there is always some kind of drama, not really heavy drama, but something, like weather related,” she said. “I’m always thinking of what is the next thing, what is the next exciting thing to happen?”

Her job and her chosen crop also keep her guessing.

“When I do get to go and collect data in the field, something I really love is just making observations, just being away and noticing things that I don’t understand and trying to figure out what is going on. There is always something,” she said.

“Every time I go to the field, I see something I don’t have an explanation for and my thought process is — what’s going on? What is happening? Why is it happening?

“What does this mean? Is this something we need to worry about? What can we learn from it? That is something I always find very exciting.”

In February, Rutkoski’s work at the U of I and her contributions to Illinois winter wheat were recognized in a financial way when Richard Siemer, president of Siemer Milling Company, headquartered in Teutopolis, announced a $1 million gift to launch the Illinois Wheat Initiative.

That initiative will fund the Siemer Milling Company Professorship at the U of I.

Rutkoski will be the first person to hold that professorship. The gift will help Rutkoski acquire technology and staff to advance wheat research.

“That was a huge boost to morale,” she said.

The gift was announced at the 2024 Double Crop Farmers Forum.

Rutkoski said the wheat community is another perk to her job.

“I really love interacting with people in the wheat industry. It is always enjoyable to talk to the stakeholders and anyone who is involved in wheat production,” she said.

“It’s always interesting to talk to people and see what’s going on, what are the challenges? What is the big news this year? What is the disease concern and what is the production issue?

“It’s cool that it’s kind of a small world in the wheat community so you can get to know almost everybody pretty quickly.”

Rutkoski didn’t have a master plan mapped out when she graduated from high school and left for college at UW-Madison.

“I was pretty open-minded. I was very much open to anything happening and I think that has been maybe why I have been able to do all these things. I just sort of found opportunities as they occurred,” she said.

“I didn’t really have a big master plan when I came to college. I was playing it by ear a lot of the time. I definitely wanted to get out in the world and these opportunities lined up with what I had always wanted to do.”