Leopold Center - From the Advisory Board

Jennifer Hoy brings more than 20 years of farming experience and a passion for sustainable agriculture to the Leopold Center Advisory Board. She was appointed in March to represent the State Soil Conservation Committee on the advisory board.

Hoy owns 522 acres in Van Buren County that have been farmed with continuous no-till since 1980. For the past four years, the farm has been operated with the assistance of her two sons, Ben Sherod, an agronomy student at Iowa State University, and Spencer Sherod, a student at Van Buren High.

A native of New York, Hoy came to Iowa in 1977 where she helped manage a 2,100-acre diversified crop and livestock farm. She was a full-time farmer until 2000, when she was hired to coordinate the Wapello County "Growing in the Garden" curriculum that reached 1,000 elementary students in Ottumwa. In May 2003, she became the Wapello County Extension Education Director.

Hoy has been active in the local Soil and Water Conservation District, hosting educational tours of various conservation practices on her farm and serving as district commissioner since 1995. In 2001, she was appointed to represent southeast Iowa on the State Soil Conservation Committee.

"I am thrilled to be on the board," Hoy said. "Sustainable agriculture is near and dear to my heart and I know that I'll be working with other people who feel the same way.

"My particular perspective is as a natural resource conservationist, but one who still needs to make a living from the land," she said. "I think the Leopold Center can play a key role in agriculture by providing research-based information to Iowa and the rest of the country."

Hoy grew up on a pure-bred Angus farm in New York state where she was active in 4-H and a member of a horse judging team at SUNY-Alfred. She has a bachelor's degree in animal science from the University of Georgia and is working on a master's degree at ISU

University of Iowa corn geneticist joins advisory board

Erin Irish, the newest member of the Leopold Center Advisory Board, has first-hand experience in ecosystems.

Irish, an associate professor in the University of Iowa Department of Biological Sciences, was appointed in July to succeed English professor emeritus Robert Sayre as one of two university representatives on the advisory board.

As a corn geneticist, Irish's research addresses the basic question of how plants grow. For her experiments, she plants and hand-pollinates about a half-acre of corn each summer.

She also has been getting a closer look at another ecosystem. She and her husband, a small animal veterinarian in Coralville, have begun to restore a 40-acre pasture in Cedar County to oak savannah. To do this, they have been digging or burning invasive species of plants, then planting seeds of native species that they have collected by hand in the surrounding area.

"This experience makes me conscious of the balance that must be maintained between generating the wealth of our state through agriculture, and preserving the natural state of our land, water and air, as well as the native species," she said.

She said that when she moved to Iowa from the East Coast in 1990, she was amazed at the amount of land under cultivation. "I am very aware of how precious open land is in this state," she said.

Irish grew up in Ohio and has a bachelor's degree in biology from Hiram College in Ohio. Her Ph.D. is from Indiana University, and she received fellowships to continue her post-doctoral work at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches introductory biology and graduate-level classes at the University of Iowa.

Her research projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Results of her work have appeared in numerous scientific journals and presented at conferences throughout the U.S.

Retiring board member Robert Sayre had served since 1994.

At their September meeting, members of the advisory board reelected three officers to serve a second one-year term. Dallas County farmer Marvin Shirley will remain as chair; with University of Northern Iowa professor Tom Fogarty as vice-chair and Drake University law professor Neil Hamilton as member-at-large.