The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture explores and cultivates alternatives that secure healthier people and landscapes in Iowa and the nation.
Frontpage Features Archive
When agriculture meets the arts
Iowa's Poet Laureate Mary Swander created "Farmscape: Iowa's Changing Rural Environment" with her creative writing students in 2008, and has been taking it on the road ever since. Based on student interviews, the cast of characters includes large and small farmers, a packing plant worker, a wine grower and a researcher. Swander is beginning her second term as Poet Laureate, and has used this production to tell the story of Iowa agriculture.
About this image: Two people interviewed for "Farmscape" were Mike and Stephanie Hanson of Perry. This photo has been projected as a background image during the production.
When 'Farmscape' first went on the road [Winter 2008 Leopold Letter]
More about Mary Swander and her role as Iowa's poet laureate [ISU News release]
Making progress on local food in Iowa
A six-member advisory council that oversees the state's new Local Food and Farm Program met for the first time this month to review progress. The program, coordinated by Craig Chase, will present a prelmiinary report to the Iowa legislature soon. Chase is interim leader of the Leopold Center's Marketing and Food Systems Initiative and the new program is based on a plan prepared by the Leopold Center a year ago. About this image: This image is from the cover of the Iowa Local Food and Farm Plan, which led to the state's new Local Food and Farm Program. Illustration by Tina Davis.
Who's on the Local Food and Farm Program Advisory Council? Details here.
Who's working on the Local Food and Farm Program? Update in our winter newsletter
More about the Iowa Local Food and Farm Plan
It's still winter in Iowa
In spite of unusually warm temperatures during December and January, the most recent snowfall is an apt reminder that it's still winter in Iowa. Besides brightening the landscape, snowfall also provides insulation to protect plants from damaging freeze-thaw cycles. Farmers and gardeners anxious for spring can keep tabs on statewide soil temperatures on this ISU Extension website. About this image: Large, round bales add to this scene of a farmstead in Story County. Photo by Barb McBreen, ISU College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
New director named
Mark Rasmussen, a supervisory microbiologist for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has been appointed to lead the Leopold Center beginning June 1, 2012. He will be the Leopold Center’s fourth director in its 25-year history.
News release about the appointment
About the search (and view his seminar)
About this image: Rasmussen during his December 5 seminar on the Iowa State campus. [Photo courtesy Huuiling Wu,Iowa State Daily]
Made from Scratch
About this photo: Practical Farmers of Iowa will host its annual conference January 13-14 at the Scheman Building in Ames. Sessions include discussion of Leopold Center-funded projects such as using cover crops in a Friday afternoon workshop and research conducted by ISU agronomy professor Matt Liebman to reduce off-farm inputs to increase profitability. The Leopold Center is a long-time supporter of PFI and among the major sponsors of this conference.
More on our upcoming events page
Listening to the land
This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. . . . On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen . . . and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it - a vast pulsing harmony - its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries. - Aldo Leopold, “Song of the Gavilan,” Journal of Wildlife Management, July 1940
White pine photo courtesy Trees Forever
Learn more about Aldo Leopold
Healthy prairie burn
2011 will be remembered at Whiterock Conservancy as a record year for burning. A late snow and dry weather created good conditions for controlled burns on 1,400 acres of oak woodland and savanna habitat this past fall. Fashioned after what occurs naturally, prescribed burns incinerate invasive cedar trees, renew the grasses and give fire-resistant native prairie plants a competitive edge. The valley along Middle Raccoon River has been managed with fire since 1992 and expanded in 2005, when the non-profit land trust was formed (the Leopold Center is a supporting organization). Areas are burned every two to four years on average, more often if they are being restored.
Watch video of current Leopold Center projects there
Conservation dogs
Meet Jackie and Charlie, two members of the Iowa Learning Farms’ Good Conservation Pack, checking out trash in a river. In November, Iowa Learning Farms and WHO-TV Channel 13 launched the Kids Who Conserve campaign website with songs, videos, pledge cards, worksheets and a place to share stories. Each month an honorary Pack Leader is selected to receive a t-shirt, gift certificate and prize plaque. The Leopold Center is a ILF partner in building a ‘Culture of Conservation’ by offering numerous videos, publications, monthly webinars and a mobile learning center, the Conservation Station. Details about the history of this partnership More about ILF’s youth education [ILF website]
Iowa-fresh lettuce -- in November?
Ajay Nair, new assistant professor in horticulture at Iowa State, is looking at ways to extend the growing season for specific food crops in Iowa. Here he is harvesting butterhead lettuce November 23 at the ISU Hort Farm north of Ames. The crop was planted October 3 in an unheated high tunnel where air temperature at harvest was still a comfortable 65 degrees. The Leopold Center is sponsoring a portion of Nair’s work to expand local food production.
Watch video about this experiment [ISU Extension and Outreach website]
Thankful reflections
Here’s a word from namesake Aldo Leopold as we pause for a truly American holiday this week: “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.” Photo by Jerry DeWitt, a farm pond at dusk in the riparian zone along Bear Creek in Story County.
Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture |
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leocenter@iastate.edu