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Read our reports from selected 20th Anniversary sessions: |
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Whether you choose to call
it “friendly fire” or unintended consequences, the
results of our actions on environmental and energy
issues are not necessarily going to produce the outcomes
we predicted or desired. Four discussants in a panel on
“Rethinking Agriculture for Healthier Plants and
Healthier Animals” considered why and how this happens,
and what might be done about it.
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Mike Duffy, ISU Extension economist, painted a less
than rosy picture of the current U.S. government
investment in policies and programs to improve the
environment through agricultural modifications. USDA
spending on conservation has declined significantly over
the last decade. In 1995, conservation subsidies made up
25 percent of the USDA commodity subsidy budget, but by
2005 that percentage had shrunk to 9 percent. Iowa
conservation subsidies weren’t much higher comprising
only 10 percent of the total in the 2005 budget. He posed the fundamental question: What are we trying to accomplish with our conservation policies? There are so many possible goals: Decrease water pollution, increase soil quality, improve wildlife habitat, and increase aesthetics of rural life. But it is difficult to maximize or minimize more than one goal at a time and there are always tradeoffs, or as economists prefer to say, “There’s no free lunch.” Among the policy approaches used to encourage environmental change:
Other possibilities for environmentally forward policies
include carbon exchanges, social accounting with respect
to environmental quality aspects of agricultural
practices, and acknowledging positive and negative
externalities related to agricultural production.
Currently, not all costs (such as ecological ones) are
accounted for in costs of production. As Duffy pointed
out, “Some say, let the market work, but sometimes the
market fails.”
However, despite the price premiums linked with organic production, the need for increased community services provided by the county offsets the local government tax revenue gains. Swenson stated that it doesn’t pay back the community financially to use tax abatement to encourage conversion to organic operations, and civic leaders will have to use other criteria (i.e., ecological, social) to justify using public funds to encourage such conversion. – Mary Adams
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The three people selected
to speak at the session that celebrated the Leopold
Center’s namesake represented different aspects of Aldo
Leopold’s life, but all spoke with the same passion and
heartfelt love of the man whose writings and legacy are
still being employed. Wellington “Buddy” Huffaker is the director of Leopold Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin, which was founded by Aldo’s children. He works in Aldo’s surroundings, teaching visitors to the new Legacy Center and the “Shack” of Leopold’s ideas. The Leopold Foundation is trying to ensure that his ideas endure. “We have both an ethical and moral responsibility to nature and the role of nature in human society,” remarked Huffaker. “Leopold lived on the land without spoiling it. And he was one of the best communicators of these principles.” Huffaker reminded us that we don’t see the long-term payoff of land ethics, although the generations that come after us will. They will enjoy the trees and prairies that we have planted. Iowa State University Vice President for Extension and Outreach Jack Payne stated that he is “a second-generation Leopoldist,” having had several of Leopold’s students as his professors. He noted that Aldo was involved with agriculture his entire life but was not a farmer. Leopold earned a living by working for the U.S. Forest Service, in game management, and was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As the first wildlife management professor in higher education, Leopold challenges, through his essays, that the farmer, the environmentalist and agribusiness work together. Jerry Rigdon is head of the Leopold Heritage Group in Burlington, Iowa, Leopold’s birthplace. The group was formed three years ago, striving to preserve what is left of Leopold’s “trampings” around Burlington and the Mississippi River. The land he explored has disappeared with the town’s growth and Keokuk’s locks and dam. Rigdon is concerned with what we have lost since Leopold’s time: prairies, sloughs, and species of animals and birds. But Burlington’s Flint Creek, one of Leopold’s boyhood environments, has been reclaimed by area environmentalists. Rigdon said that Leopold’s writings change people’s hearts and minds individually, and that we need to apply his message to all aspects of the environment, both rural and urban. Huffaker summed up the session, “What we do is an epilogue to A Sand County Almanac. An ethic is not written.” – Carol Brown
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“The land is not a
machine.” Dana Jackson summed up the session,
"Rethinking Agriculture for a Living Land," in fairly
simple terms. After starting the discussion with
comments on two thought-provoking essays (Don’t
buy local! and Where there’s muck there’s brass), the
panel agreed that one size doesn’t fit all for solutions
to feeding and fueling our nation. "Don’t buy local" author Richard Conniff says that buying local isn’t necessarily the best decision: some foods are best raised (or grown) in more appropriate geographic areas than others. For example, someone in California buying “local” rice supports rice that was probably grown in heavily irrigated deserts at huge environmental costs. Laura DeCook and her husband Mike, operate a family ranch in southern Iowa, raising grass-fed cattle. She offers a compromise: give the consumer the option to buy locally. Their organic beef is in local stores next to the other beef, of which we can only speculate about its origin. Jackson, associate director for The Land Stewardship Project in Minnesota, stated that we need to think of our local dairies, wineries, and orchards as community assets, which we generally don’t do now. Dave Swenson, an ISU economics research scientist, followed up, “we have an economic impact opportunity when we buy local. The more money we keep in the community for a length of time, the more sustainable we can be. The horticulture environment is one area where being locally-sustainable works. There are certain areas where we can enhance our local economy. It’s not all or nothing.” When it comes to fueling ourselves, the panel agreed that producing “bio-gas” may not be the best idea either. "The second article talked about encouraging the production of biogas from cow manure and methane. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) has proposed a bill that gives tax credit for evolving "bio-gas" producers. All panelists agreed that this idea goes in the wrong direction, calling this a “closed loop process.” Jackson pointed out that we are making decisions with the expectation that we will continue with our current lifestyles. "There are other ways to think about the energy issue – to conserve energy instead of increasing production. Our landscape needs to be a 'living landscape.'" – Carol Brown
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More questions and thought-provoking observations
emerged after hearing Joan Dye Gussow and Angie Tagtow
speak about changing Iowa’s future food systems. Gussow, professor emerita and former chair of the Nutrition Education Program at Teachers College in Columbia University, challenged her listeners to eat more food from their region. “Scale issues are huge. What does it really cost to produce our food? We need to engage eaters to the food system. Every person should know a farmer.” “We had bad spinach, ground beef, and scallions, but it took the pet food catastrophe to open our eyes to where our food comes from,” she pointed out. She said that diseases such as E. coli could be eliminated if cattle could be raised differently. Tagtow, an Iowa nutrition consultant, presented her Vision for Good Food in Iowa, summing it in four words: Healthy, Green, Fair and Affordable. Her presentation highlighted Iowa's many food contradictions. “The food grown in Iowa does not meet human nutritional needs,” she said. “Crops are grown in Iowa –but most are not grown for direct human consumption. For example, our corn goes to feed livestock, for conversion to corn syrup, and to make ethanol.” But two-thirds of Iowans are considered obese. Tagtow observed the same federal agency that controls agricultural subsidies also controls food guidelines. "The nutrition density is greater in the foods grown in Iowa and processed foods take more energy than whole foods,” she said, giving us another reason why buying local makes sense. Tagtow’s vision is that “all eaters have equal and regular access to safe, nutritious, seasonal and sustainably produced food to maintain a healthy lifestyle.” – Carol Brown
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Bill Haman spoke to a full room in the day's last round of
breakout sessions. After a day packed with information,
everyone at “Harnessing Iowa’s Wind Energy” was still
engaged. Haman manages industrial programs and the Alternate Energy Revolving Loan program at the Iowa Energy Center in Nevada. He started simply by posing the question to the audience, “What is wind?” But there was stillness in the air as we tried to give a technical definition. He let us off the hook by providing, “Wind is a byproduct of solar energy, coming from the uneven heating and cooling of the earth.” Iowa is the tenth windiest state and third in wind energy generation, following behind Texas and California. The northwest corner of Iowa is windiest, but it is not consistent. The Iowa Energy Center has been monitoring the wind by month with March and April being the windiest. There is virtually no wind in Iowa during the summer months when energy demand is at its highest. Wind power development is in its infancy in Iowa. Technology and research are expanding. Currently we don’t know how to store wind energy so it must be used as it is generated. In addition to power storage, researchers are looking at harnessing strong wind and low wind speeds (a turbine begins to generate energy when winds reach 7 mph), turbine design and materials. The wind industry will create manufacturing jobs, vocational jobs including operators and maintenance, and new academic programs are being created to study wind energy. There are several school districts in Iowa that have erected wind turbines to generate power for their buildings; Spirit Lake was the first school district, building their first turbine in 1993. Cerro Gordo County is home to the first Iowa wind farm. There are 11 wind farms in Iowa with several more being built. Wind energy is beginning to make an impact on the agriculture industry. Farmers are erecting turbines to power their homes and facilities such as hog confinements. Now there are price incentives, financing plans, and tax credits to encourage wind power. Farmers are combining their resources to leverage better prices for their power and less money to connect transmission lines. But Haman warned that pencils need to be put to paper before you put up a turbine on your farm. Several factors need to be considered to determine whether wind energy is a feasible option. According to Haman, one needs to ensure that turbine location “is within a good wind regime, within close proximity to the utility grid, having favorable terrain, and good neighbors.” – Carol Brown
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Back to Fall 2007 Leopold Letter
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