Leopold Center - From the advisory board

What qualities are desirable for a Leopold Center advisory board member? Concern for agriculture and the environment, knowledge of the Leopold Center, and an interest in the future of Iowa's farmers are some obvious characteristics. The Leopold Center feels fortunate to have Laura Jackson, the newest member of the advisory board, embody so many of these traits.

In late May, Jackson was appointed by University of Northern Iowa president Robert Koob as one of the school's two representatives on the board. She replaces Paul Whitson, a ten-year veteran of the advisory board, and joins Tom Fogarty, a UNI geography professor.

Like Whitson, Jackson is a UNI biology professor. She regularly teaches courses in applied ecology, conservation biology, general biology labs and environmental studies; with forays into advanced ecology and the ecology of agricultural systems. Her academic background includes a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology (with an agronomy minor) from Cornell University. She has been a member of the UNI faculty since 1993.

Sitting on the advisory board isn't Jackson's first association with the Leopold Center. In the 1990s, she conducted a four-year, Center-funded research project, “Incorporating Native Plant Communities on Farms for Forage and Wildlife.” Working with three farmers, she demonstrated and assessed the planting of prairie grasses and wildflowers in rotationally grazed pastures in northeast Iowa.

Jackson looks at the big picture, too. She is tracking how large-scale trends in agriculture such as concentrated livestock operations affect the flow of nutrients across the landscape. She and Dennis Keeney, former Center director, were two of the co-authors of a 2000 paper on some of the impacts of manure management in a region with a very high livestock concentration.

Jackson is a long-time Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) supporter and has collaborated with PFI member Tom Frantzen on federally-funded research that examines non-chemical methods of quackgrass control. She serves on Iowa's advisory board for the State Preserves System, reflecting her interest in preservation and restoration of Iowa's prairies, forests and wetlands. She is active in her county’s efforts to help control invasive species such as garlic mustard in parks and public areas.

Asked about her personal approach to sustainable agriculture, Jackson says she generally adopts the broad-based view of a conservation biologist. Key questions that she would like the Leopold Center to consider are: “How can the Midwestern landscape provide an ample living for its farmers and produce food for people, but function more like a native prairie--supporting a diversity of wildlife, recycling nutrients, producing clean groundwater and building topsoil for future generations? Just as important, how can we get food shoppers to see connections between their grocery list and the health of our nation's farms, rural communities, and land?”

Many of Jackson's ideas about sustainable agriculture appear in the book she co-edited in 2002, The Farm as Natural Habitat: Reconnecting Food Systems to Ecosystems. She salutes sustainable farmers as the ones who are “restoring a relationship between farming and the natural world that welcomes greater biodiversity and the use of free ecological services in their operations.” Contributors bring together insights and practices from conservation biology, sustainable agriculture and biodiversity, and farming, in support of the idea that the agricultural landscape can be restored to a healthy diversity.

Jackson's passionate interest in environmental issues and the future of agriculture isn’t at all surprising when you look at her family background. Kamyar Enshayan, her husband and fellow UNI professor, has led several important Leopold Center projects exploring the mechanics and benefits of local food systems.

Her mother is Dana L. Jackson, associate director of the Land Stewardship Project in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, and the co-editor of The Farm as Natural Habitat: Reconnecting Food Systems to Ecosystems. Wes Jackson, her father, is president of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and author of several books, including New Roots for Agriculture and Altars of Unhewn Stone: Science and the Earth.

At home, Jackson is mother to two young daughters, Nettie and Ada.