Name: Jayson Otto
Year in program: 5
ABD Y/N: Y
Primary supervisor: Thomas Summerhill
Major field: American History
Minor fields: Cultural Environmental History; Agricultural History
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Jayson is a cultural environmental historian that came to the MSU history department after a couple of decades of scholarship, teaching, and practice from a variety of disciplines, perspectives, and domains both inside and outside academia.
His current research is a regional study of fruit and vegetable farming in West Michigan where he is uncovering a complex and diverse network of farmers, workers, dealers, processors, eaters, and shippers in the second most diverse agricultural region of the United States. He shows how overproduction, unstable markets, and climate change have all contributed to cycles of boom and bust over the last century or so, while small, diverse farms may not have dominated, but rarely failed.
Jayson lives in Grand Rapids with his wife Kelly in an 1893 home they have been restoring over the last twenty years. He spends as much time as possible with his daughters and grandson.