Sustainable ag gets academic home, Center boost

Seeds have been sown for a new graduate program in sustainable agriculture at Iowa State University beginning with the 2001-02 academic year.

Nearly 80 faculty, students and supporters gathered in September to celebrate what is believed to be the nation's first program to award master's and doctorate degrees in sustainable agriculture, approved by the Iowa Board of Regents in July. The event ended with a symbolic toss of seeds collected from 140 crops throughout Iowa, as well as five continents, to mark diversity of the new curriculum.

"This is what happens when a group of young, energetic faculty, students and members of the sustainable ag community coalesce and keep on pushing," said Lorna Michael Butler, who is the university's first Henry A. Wallace Endowed Chair for Sustainable Agriculture and whose office will provide administrative support for the program. "Very few programs bring together the biological, physical and social sciences and the humanities like this one does."

Classes will be offered in ten departments: agricultural and biosystems engineering, agricultural education and studies, agronomy, animal science, anthropology, entomology, forestry, horticulture, plant pathology and sociology. ISU's status as the nation's first land-grant university and its ties with sustainable agriculture through the Leopold Center, ISU Extension, ISU's organic horticulture research program and Practical Farmers of Iowa also have been cited as logical reasons to create the new program in Iowa.

The program begins with $45,000 seed money from the Leopold Center, approved by the center's advisory board last summer. The money will be used with matching funds from the College of Agriculture to support a graduate student assistantship for up to three years. The advisory board asked that the assistantship be named the Leopold Fellowship.

The program has received similar support from several academic departments on campus. More information is available on the program's new web site, or by contacting the ISU Henry A. Wallace Endowed Chair for Sustainable Agriculture, 110 Curtiss Hall, IA 50011-1050; (515) 294-60561.