Q. How would you frame the priority issues for the Leopold Center?

We have no shortage of issues to tackle or areas that demand our energies and attention at the Leopold Center! We hear from many of you informally and at workshops or meetings. We also hear or read about concerns emanating from outside Iowa. And we listen.

Recently the entire Leopold Center staff participated in a day-long retreat to consider the critical issues facing sustainable agriculture. What have we heard that resonates beyond the current news cycle? What should be on our agenda? What are Iowa’s present and future needs that require our attention and commitment? How do we better define our Center’s role and activities?

The staff agreed on six areas of interest, or core issues:

• Landscape diversification, with livestock as a key component;

• Needs of Iowa’s midsize farmer, “agriculture of the middle”;

• Protection and renewal of Iowa’s soil and water;

• Connections between food and health;

• Role of energy conservation in the bioeconomy, and

• Local policies that support sustainability in Iowa.

Q. How will we work with these core issues?

By no means do these six core issues replace the Center’s very important initiatives in ecology, policy and marketing and food systems. These core issues will serve as a template to frame our initiative work.

Not every project we fund in the coming year, or all of our efforts in various arenas, will center on these core issues. But articulating them has helped us to reaffirm what we stand for, where we need to raise visibility and awareness, and what we can attempt to create or change. These core issues will guide in our competitive grants process, and sharpen our focus on where we might invest seed money to move worthwhile ideas along and start the hard work that is needed.

I also hope we can use these core issues to stimulate discussion throughout Iowa. To me, they offer a road map that spells out clearly and simply, “Here is what we are for….not what we are against.”

How can you set priorities across these important areas?

Because we believe in the power of agricultural “systems,” we cannot work on any one area independent of the others. Consider the connections involved. A diversified landscape has positive implications for soil and water resources, and such a landscape may help sustain the midsize farming operation. A focus on food and health connections can lead to more diversity in the landscape by promoting use of new crops and associated processing facilities, which call for local policies to support them. These six core issues, like so many aspects of agriculture, are closely linked, either directly or indirectly.

Q. Which area seems to be the biggest threat to a more sustainable agriculture?

Of course, all six core issues if left unchallenged have dire implications for the sustainability of our land and resources, agriculture and rural communities. But the one issue that demands our immediate attention is the bioeconomy.

The speed of establishment and local acceptance of new ethanol plants has been breathtaking. The lure of ethanol’s financial benefits and potential opportunities in cellulosic fuel production has caused producers to make a number of swift decisions. These decisions could have broad implications that may not have been fully understood. I am concerned by the unforeseen impacts, as the tsunami of biofuels activity sweeps across the landscape, and as one decision is made, others are not even discussed.

Consider the rapid increase in land values, ever-rising cash rental rates for land and the availability of land. There’s also the impact of feeding ethanol co-products in the cattle industry, the return of currently protected Conservation Reserve Program land to row crop production, and the uncharted effects of ethanol plants on our rural communities and water supplies. One also must look at long-term soil health and risks of increased soil erosion inherent in a large-scale shift to energy versus food production.

I am not saying these problems are insurmountable; these issues have not had their fair turn yet at the discussion table. But, it is time to put these issues on the table for thoughtful debate. The Leopold Center will be there to talk about these issues with you — it’s our job and our responsibility.

As always, I am anxious to hear what you think about these ideas. Contact me at jdewitt@iastate.edu.

Jerry DeWitt