Highlight Events

One of Iowa’s emerging leaders in ecology, land conservation and agriculture will discuss the need to connect farms with their environments October 19 on the Iowa State University campus in Ames.

Laura Jackson will present “The Farm as Natural Habitat” at 7 p.m. in the College of Business auditorium, 1148 Gerdin. Her presentation is part of the 2005 Shivvers Memorial Lecture in memory of John Shivvers who farmed near Knoxville.

Jackson is a biology professor at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. She and her students currently are studying how to add wildflower species to grass-dominated prairie plantings. These techniques could be applied to roadsides, CRP fields and rotationally grazed pastures.

In 2002, she co-edited a book of essays, The Farm as Natural Habitat: Reconnecting Food Systems to Ecosystems, with her mother, Dana L. Jackson, senior program associate for the Land Stewardship Project in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. Jackson’s father Wes is president of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.

Jackson has served on the Leopold Center advisory board since 2003. She has a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell University and has been a member of the UNI faculty since 1993.

A reception will follow the lecture. Parking is available at the East Campus Parking Deck east of the Gerdin building.

The public is invited to learn what’s happening in local and regional food systems at a December 8 workshop in Ames. The workshop will feature progress reports from more than 25 projects that are being funded, in part, by the Leopold Center Marketing and Food Systems Initiative and the Regional Food Systems Working Group (also coordinated by the Center).

The workshop will be held at the Gateway Conference Center, running from 8:30 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. Register by December 5 at http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/workshop.htm.