Free to Small Farmers: Who says big farmers get all the breaks? I have some good news specifically directed to small farmers. Chainparency, a blockchain company, is providing complementary access to their software for the next year. Using blockchain technology, farmers can prove their food origin and chain of custody with a digitized record; providing a high level of transparency that will build trust between distributors and consumers. Chainparency’s 12-month Global Acceleration Program for Sustainability (GAPS) program is designed to …
Garst Conservation Easements
A conservation easement is a legal agreement recorded as part of a property title, with the usual goal of protecting conservation land use into perpetuity, regardless of land transfer. Conservation easements have been used by government entities and land trusts, like local conservation boards and The Nature Conservancy, for over 100 years. Back in May 2021, I received a call from Liz Garst, the Family Business Manager of Garst Farms in Coon Rapids, Iowa. Liz shared that the Garst family had made the difficult decision to sell their family …
Blockchain: The New Tool for Sustainability
As a child, I remember watching documentaries where wildlife biologists would track grizzly bears through the wilds of Montana. It always astonished me that scientists would risk their lives to tranquilize and collar a bear to track its whereabouts. Since those days, much has changed in our ability to tag and track locations. Today we have geotags, data loggers, advanced mapping systems and even solar powered GPS ear tags to track animal habits. Technology has advanced to the point where we can monitor the movement of cattle within in herd, …
Saturated Buffers
For the past few years, Dr. Dan Jaynes, USDA-Agriculture Research Service, and Dr. Tom Isenhart, Iowa State University, have been researching ways to remove nitrogen from tile water. Their research culminated in the development of saturated buffers, a new water protection practice. Saturated buffers rely on denitrifying bacteria to convert nitrates within the tile water to nitrogen gas, before the water is discharged into a water body. Jaynes and Isenhart have developed a method to intercept tile water that would otherwise flow directly into a …
Irrigating the Upper Midwest
For any country that wants to grow an adequate and stable food supply, some level of irrigation is necessary. Even in the Upper Midwestern U.S., where there is ample rain-fed cropland, we count on irrigated acres to provide stable crop production, especially in drought years. As recently as 1988 and 2012, corn and soybean yields in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana tanked, because of droughts. The U.S. food supply would have been on unstable ground in those years, without the irrigated areas in the Great Plains. The Ogallala Aquifer, underlying …
Honoring the Past
Late last year, Peggy and I were vacationing in Alabama. Driving along Interstate 85, I noticed signs for Tuskegee, Alabama. It took me a few miles to put things together, but I started to recall my history lesson about George Washington Carver and his passion for soil health. In one of those unplanned side trips, Peggy and I exited I85 and toured the George Washington Carver Museum on the campus of Tuskegee University. The son of a slave woman, Carver was born into slavery, and spent his childhood in Missouri. In 1888, Carver moved …