Ag research center continues 100-year celebration

Northern Agricultural Research Center will be continuing its centennial celebration during Festival Days and giving the public a chance to see up close, and own, a special part of that milestone.

"When we celebrated our 100-year anniversary, we commissioned Don Greytak to do a historical representation of 100 years of agricultural research," said Darrin Boss, superintendent of the research center, which is part of the College of Agriculture at Montana State University in Bozeman.

Havre artist Don Greytak, who is famous for catching the spirit and details of early- and mid-1900 rural life in historically accurate pencil drawings, took about a year to research, consult with NARC staff and draw the art piece, said Boss.

"It was a very exciting time for me," Boss said, "because we were digging out old photographs and old things he could use to do a pencil sketch to draw of our 100-year anniversary."

The commissioned piece was unveiled at NARC's centennial celebration, held July 1 during the center's annual Field Day. It was also revealed that 500 prints, signed and numbered by Greytak, would go on sale that day.

"All the money and proceeds will go to the benefit of Northern Ag Research Center, longterm infrastructure improvements, et cetera," Boss said.

The limited-edition artwork will be featured on NARC's float for the Festival Days parade Saturday, and people can view it up close at a booth the center will have at the last Saturday Market of the summer in Town Square that day. The prints sell for $50 each.

While doing research for the piece, Greytak said, he met with Boss and Peggy Lamb, a veteran agronomy scientist at the center, to discuss how best to depict the center's history.

NARC became part of north-central Montana's heritage in 1911, when Fort Assinniboine was decommissioned and its land divided into three parts to become what is now Beaver Creek Park, Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation and the research center, which is located around the fort building site.

Researchers broke ground at NARC in 1915 when farmers tilled the earth with teams of horses and one of the first steam engine tractors in the area - a scene that was captured in the artwork.

When it was finally decided to depict NARC's history in different scenes - half showing the history of agronomy research and half showing the beef cattle research - it was also decided to feature Fort Assinniboine prominently across the top.

"It was a little bit of a pressure to do something that would work and come a little bit close to having what they hoped it would have," Greytak said.

It helped to see what the researchers were doing today, he said, walk around the site, look through all the archival photos of the center and talk with Boss and Lamb, along with Ray Thackeray, who worked at NARC and lived at the station for 32 years.

Thackeray goes so far back, Boss said, that he retired before Boss started 22 years ago.

Greytak said he needed help with a particular piece of farm equipment, a cone seeder, that was used to seed the crop test plots starting in the 1950s, and Thackeray was the only person still around who remembered it.

"Usually when I get through with (my drawings), I have put so much energy into them I don't want to see them again, but this one had a little different feel to it," Greytak said.

Boss said he was amazed that Greytak's research process - collecting details and data, then disseminating that information to others - strongly paralleled how the scientists work at NARC.

"He couldn't have been more perfect for what we wanted to do," Boss said. "... It's a pretty neat sketch if you're from the Hi-line and have anything to do with agriculture."