Macalester senior awarded 2025 Watson Fellowship

Meira Smit ’25 has been awarded with a 2025 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Fellowship recipients are graduating seniors nominated by one of 41 partner institutions. They receive a $40,000 stipend, student loan assistance, and health care for a one-year project outside the United States.

Smit, an environmental studies major with an education minor, will be traveling to five countries for her project, titled “Reviving the Land, Reimagining Farming.” She plans to connect with local farmers, policy makers, and NGOs to learn more about sustainable, ancestral agricultural practices and how those practices help advance generational succession, which is the passing down of a business to the next generation.

Growing up on a farm in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Smit knows a thing or two about generational succession. She started developing a bioregional identity – an identity defined by geography rather than political or administrative borders – from a young age, spending most of her time outdoors. Once she arrived at Macalester, she said she deepened her understanding of that identity through the River Semester program, which provided an opportunity to spend 100 days traveling down the Mississippi River.

“I learned that I love sleeping in a different place every night,” Smit said of her experience on the river. “I found that I’m really adaptable to new environments if I can find home in myself and with the people I’m around.”

Smit said she hopes to find home in five new places through the Watson Fellowship: Canada, Ecuador, Germany, India, and Kenya. A main focus of her inquiry will be to investigate how small-scale farms in each of these countries are responding to the increasing threats posed by global climate change.

“Talking to farmers who farm in different climates is going to inform how other farmers are going to do stuff in the future with a changing climate,” Smit said. “In a hundred years, we can expect that the region 500 miles south of us is going to be our climate – so the climate of Kansas or Missouri is going to be the climate in Minnesota. The more people we know who are working on solutions, the more chance we have of surviving those changes.”

Smit aims to cultivate lasting relationships with these global partners, with a goal of forming a broader bioregional identity, one that can transcend international borders.

“Until our food producers are seen as an essential part of our global society, we have no chance at climate change solutions or social justice solutions,” she said. “The ideal is a global network of small-scale farmers who want to engage in change, and I want to be part of that.”

About the Watson Fellowship

In 1961, Jeannette K. Watson established the Watson Foundation in honor of her late husband, Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM. According to the Foundation’s website, the program’s goal is to provide opportunities for graduating college students to “explore with thoroughness a particular interest, test their aspirations and abilities, view their lives and American society in greater perspective, and, concomitantly, develop a more informed sense of international concern.”