It was a happy accident stemming from a case of mistaken identity. But if all goes as planned, a Perry vegetable grower’s views on corporate agriculture will be featured prominently Sunday in the editorial pages of The Denver Post.

Paul Johnson’s commentary already has been featured on the op-ed pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Des Moines Register.

Since the National Prairie Writers Circle mistakenly asked him to submit an article and then accepted what he wrote, his views have been getting play in some of the nation’s major newspapers.

Johnson’s writing has ranked with works from other more famous authors on the Prairie Writers list. That list includes poet and essayist Wendell Berry; Robert Day, author of “The Last Cattle Drive”; Bill McKibben, “The End of Nature”; Frank and Deborah Popper, “The Buffalo Commons: Metaphor as Method”; and Kansas University professor Donald Worster, “Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West.”

The Denver Post plans to have Johnson represent the sustainable-agriculture point of view in a “pro-and-con” look at the controversy surrounding plans for test-planting a crop that has been genetically engineered to carry genes for pharmaceutical drugs. Big agriculture — the other side — will be represented by the Colorado Farm Bureau.

The piece is scheduled to run Sunday on the front page of The Post’s opinion section.

“This is a hot issue in Colorado,” said Ed Eweden, deputy editorial page editor at the Post.

A broad voice

Eweden found Johnson’s comments while leafing through a batch of opinion pieces submitted by the National Prairie Writers Circle, which is sponsored by The Land Institute, a Salina-based nonprofit environmental organization dedicated to developing nature-friendly crops.

Two or three times a month, National Prairie Writers Circle submits one or two opinion pieces to editorial page editors at close to 100 of the nation’s largest newspapers.

“We’ve done very well. We’ve made it into some of the bigger markets — Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles,” said Harris Rayl, director of the writers circle and a former publisher of the Salina Journal.

After separating the husk from a head of wheat, Laurel Nagengast, 10, shows her father, Dan, a kernel on their rural Douglas County farm. Dan Nagengast is a contributing editor for The Land Institute's Prairie Writers Circle, which writes columns on sustainable agriculture and rural living. Their articles have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Kansas City Star and St. Louis Dispatch. Nagengast, who tended to his vegetable garden on Thursday, is one of several Lawrence-area advocates involved in the writers circle.

There’s also a Kansas Prairie Writers Circle. It sends similar pieces to the state’s daily and weekly newspapers.

Last year, the state circle distributed an article on genetically modified crops by Dan Nagengast, a rural Lawrence organic farmer and executive director of the Kansas Rural Center.

“I tried to make the point that all of us need to stand back and look at what’s going on in agriculture, our environment and our rural communities,” Nagengast said. “By that I mean, here we are in Kansas growing more grain and raising more cattle than ever before, and yet our schools are closing; small towns are drying up.

“Why is that? It’s because the profits that used to come from agriculture and that used to stay in or near these communities are now going somewhere else.”

¢ U.S. must face food debate¢ The Land Institute – Prairie Writers Circle

More Lawrence ties

Other Lawrence-area writers whose opinions have been distributed by Kansas Prairie Writers Circle are Haskell Indian Nations University English professor Denise Low-Weso and former Friends of the Kaw riverkeeper Dave Murphy.

Johnson said he was added to the National Prairie Writers Circle list by accident.

“There’s another Paul Johnson — he’s Paul W., I’m Paul D. — in Iowa,” Johnson said, explaining that Rayl’s office erroneously sent him an invitation intended for his Iowa counterpart. The error wasn’t caught until after Johnson the Kansan had turned in his commentary.

“They said to send it in anyway and they’d take a look at it,” Johnson said. “It turned out they liked it, and we sort of went from there.”

Paul W. Johnson is a former director of the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service. He now farms near Decorah, Iowa, and is a member of the National Prairie Writers Circle.