Dr Michael van der Laan balances his work as an Extraordinary lecturer in UP’s Department of Plant and Soil Sciences with a full-time job as a specialist researcher in water science at the Agricultural Research Council, proving that dropping out of varsity for a while doesn’t mean you aren’t destined for success.

Dr Michael van der Laan is both a university dropout and a top achiever, who graduated cum laude all the way until he achieved his PhD at the age of 29. He is a dropout in the sense that he left his BSc studies at the University of Pretoria (UP) in the middle of his second year and set off for the UK and Europe. Call it a sabbatical.

“I told everyone I'd be back,” says Dr Van der Laan, who proved the sceptics wrong when he did return to pick up his studies in the middle of the following year. “I just sort of stopped; I just wanted a change of scenery, and I wanted to be independent.”

But after working in a bar in Edinburgh, then in one in London, as well as in a post office, followed by a month in a tomato glass house in the Netherlands and another four in an ornamental plant nursery, he finished his studies. Rejuvenated from his travels, he cracked 12 distinctions in his undergraduate degree.

His career has continued to follow its distinctive trajectory. Dr Van der Laan completed his PhD at UP in agronomy, a field he describes as being “the combination of soil and crop management in the production of field crops such as maize, wheat and soybean as opposed to fruit and vegetables, which is more horticulture”. After that, he left for Durban, where he worked for the South African Sugarcane Research Institute doing systems modelling in agronomy. Almost three years later, he came back to UP and worked his way up to being an associate professor.

In 2021, after nearly a decade in full-time academia, he left to join the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) as a specialist researcher in water science, a position he still holds. He rejoined UP the following year as an Extraordinary lecturer in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences in the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences. The position is honorary; this is almost a way of saying it is voluntary. He doesn’t earn a salary, although the Department of Higher Education and Training pays a financial subsidy for published articles and the money goes into his University cost centre fund, which he can use to attend conferences. He loves his job at the ARC, but he loves being at UP too.

The research is exactly the same as his day-to-day work, he says. However, being affiliated with the University has advantages that go beyond the prestige of being associated with UP. Top of his list is being able to be the main supervisor of postgraduate students, a role that might provide some form of compensation in the future.

“I’m passionate about supervising postgrads,” Dr Van der Laan says. “And if you supervise a good student, they make you productive and help you reach your publication targets.”

Ultimately, however, the tie is emotional.

“UP is my home. It’s where I did all my studies.”

The position of an Extraordinary lecturer excludes actual lecturing. But, he says, the teaching wasn't really his interest – it’s always been the actual research. Ironically, he proved to be a creative problem-solver when he did teach.

“When I started lecturing, I had to redesign the practical part of my course for 150 students from very diverse backgrounds, mostly not agriculture. Many were trying to get into veterinary science or medicine, but didn’t have the marks, so they took biological sciences. They were really not interested in crops and soil. We’d have practicals on the farm where they’d have to calibrate a planter or a fertiliser applicator, and do soil surveys and analyses. But many were not interested. They were mostly just on their phones, thinking, ‘How soon can this end?’”

So he got them to grow a crop and film it. Not only did the students become interested in what they were doing, but posting their videos on social media turned out to be quite constructive, Dr Van der Laan says, as their learning connected with others who were trying to grow the same crop.

The project has taken off in a big way, although Dr Van der Laan is a bit sad that he didn’t complete the part of it that included reflection and publication, as it no longer includes research into how the students respond to the different components and what they learned. Its Facebook page, Ingesta: Farming for the Future, has accumulated more than 4 500 followers since 2017. It is part of the PPK251 curriculum (Sustainable Crop Production and Agroclimatology), and was used to create an online training programme for small-scale farmers across South Africa as part of an official Water Research Commission project.

When it comes to his own research, Dr Van der Laan recently had his National Research Foundation (NRF) C2 rating renewed. This reinforces his position as an established researcher. He is grateful for the rating, especially its value as a benchmark.

“It is good to know that your research, your work, is being seen as worthy of rating according to the NRF system.”

He thrives on his job at the council, which is mostly about researching agricultural water.

“I love it. I haven't looked back once,” he says.

Highlights include being part of the group of international scientists working on the Agricultural Model Inter-comparison and Improvement Project, which predicts what’s going to happen to different crops as a result of climate change.

“It’s great to work with top, top-level scientists,” he says.

He is also passionate about his work with the International Committee on Irrigation and Drainage, and its South African counterpart, for which he is the treasurer.

Dr Van der Laan’s accolades include being part of the team awarded last year’s Soil Science Society of South Africa’s Best Paper on New Technology Award at its combined annual congress with the Southern African Society for Horticultural Sciences and the South African Society of Crop Production. Every litre of water sold in South Africa has been charged with a research levy since 1984, which goes to the Water Research Commission. The award was for building a cloud-based big data platform called the Water Research Observatory for the commission.

He was also part of a team of researchers which included some from the US and three PhD students from UP, who took three years to build this platform. They used data analytics as well as surface water and groundwater modelling “to predict, using satellite imagery, how groundwater levels change, without actually having to physically measure in a well or a borehole, and to develop a model of an early-warning system of a flood or really low water levels in a river”.

When he is not hard at work or travelling – a perk of his research – Dr Van der Laan follows football, specifically Orlando Pirates and Tottenham Hotspur, and goes birding.

“It started quite a while back, but now I suppose maybe it's a middle-aged thing, to spend your leisure time in different ways.”