Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Guest Column: Twenty years of promoting idea, ideals of sustainable agriculture

Back to Leopold Letter Summer 2007

By NEIL HAMILTON, Guest columnist

As we celebrate 20 years of activities for the Leopold Center, my words to best describe this history are innovation, responsiveness and evolution.

The Center was created by the Groundwater Protection Act of 1987, itself a critical marker in Iowa’s legal history that set out our rights as citizens to enjoy clean groundwater and our obligations to protect it from degradation. The context for creating the Leopold Center was recognition of the need to confront the reality of modern agricultural production, which threatened not just the soil and water resources on which Iowa exists but our state’s longstanding commitment to the ideals of stewardship.

The agriculture of today has made important strides in addressing issues of natural resource protection, but exploitive attitudes toward the environment coupled with new demands on our agricultural resources mean the role of the Center in confronting the realities of modern agriculture has not waned. The lens of history allows us to see the Leopold Center’s creation as one of several important policy developments in the late 1980s, which now shine as a late 20th century flowering of Leopold’s land ethic – or at least our version of it. Passage of the landmark conservation title in the 1985 farm bill, which created the powerful Conservation Reserve Program and added the terms sodbuster, swampbuster and conservation compliance to our agricultural lexicon, is another symbol of this era.

Today the Center's mission has broadened to reflect a more comprehensive vision of the meaning of sustainability. In the early years the Leopold Center was directly engaged in the debate over the definition, meaning and effect of the term “sustainable agriculture.” Important questions of what it was, who it threatened – and who it might benefit – helped drive the political debate and shaped the environment in which the Center’s work was scrutinized. But the Center was created as a research institution charged with developing new knowledge and insights for how agriculture could be made more sustainable.

A key question in these early years was how the research community at Iowa State and other institutions would respond to our call for new research and new interdisciplinary ways to organize it. In some ways the Center’s challenge was like turning the head of a powerful steed. But the vision of sustainability, the challenge of serving agriculture, and the availability of new research money proved to be powerful inducements. The rewarding news was that a community of researchers, academics – and, of course, farmers as seen in the ranks of the Practical Farmers of Iowa – was interested in the idea of sustainable agriculture and was anxious and willing to work with the Center.

The Center helped all these communities see how the concept of sustainable agriculture could be a unifying theme – one marrying the farmer’s natural concern for economic profitability with a desire for environmental stewardship. In many ways, the test and success of these past 20 years has been how well the staff, board and research community have lived up to the challenge of Aldo Leopold’s legacy. The early focus of the Center was almost exclusively on resource and environmental issues. This was natural, given the source of the law and a funding stream generated from a tax on nitrogen and pesticide registration fees. There were several early successes that showed the promise of the Leopold Center and the hint of greater things to come. These stories are told in the pages of its annual reports.

But as years passed, the recognition grew that the Center’s efforts were too one-dimensional. Focusing only on resources meant the value and potential of people, food and communities were not being realized. So in the late 1990s the Center staff and advisory board undertook an intentional effort to broaden the Leopold Center’s work to capture more fully the guidance in the statutory definition of sustainable agriculture. The most successful component of that work has been in the area of food systems – especially examining the operation of Iowa’s food system and identifying and supporting valuable citizen-led efforts to seek new opportunities within.

We have seen great results. As society recognized the importance of healthy food –– the Center worked to fill a void created by the lack of institutional work on food system analysis. The Center is playing a critical, catalyzing role and leading with original research, perhaps best reflected in Rich Pirog’s groundbreaking “food miles” work that remains the Center report most frequently downloaded from the Internet.

Similar leadership is being provided by the Center’s “agriculture in the middle” initiative. The key is keeping people and policy makers focused on the type of family farm structure so critical to our state – even while this type of farming may be declining in other agricultural regions.

Now as the leadership of the Leopold Center, Iowa State University, the General Assembly and the state look forward, and hope to prepare our state for the future, the question remains: what is the role of sustainable agriculture? What will sustainable agriculture mean in an era of increasing demand for alternative energy from agriculture and the movement to a post-industrial model of food production? These are critical issues and we do not have answers. But we can engage in a search for truth, insight and understanding. Our state can take comfort in knowing the staff and leaders of the Leopold Center have these issues in their sights and are anxious to help lead this search.

If I could make a prediction for the future and the continuing evolution of the Leopold Center’s work, it is our need to give attention to rural policy – the people, land and communities that create the context in which sustainable agricultural systems must operate. Some rural economic activities relate directly to traditional agriculture production but other activities may not – either way they are both still rural and as such will be an increasing important theme as we help Iowans chart a future that is fulfilling.

Sustainable agriculture must respond to the needs of society and in this regard rural America has many needs. One important role for the Leopold Center is to help all of us ask the difficult questions and engage in the search for answers and alternatives. Our current rush to seek opportunities in renewable energy from agriculture raises many such questions – is it sustainable, can its economic benefits be spread more evenly and equitably across the landscape of rural America? These are issues the Leopold Center can and will help us address. As we craft the 2007 farm bill, the wisdom of the Leopold Center’s founders – visionaries like Paul Johnson and David Osterberg – becomes even more clear and the vital need for and role of the Leopold Center even more apparent.

Back to Leopold Letter Summer 2007