Recently I attended a soil health conference in Ames, Iowa. At the noon lunch, Dr. John Lawrence of Iowa State University, addressed the challenges of improving soil conservation and water quality. Dr. Lawrence commented that achieving the goals of the Nutrient Reduction Strategy are probably equivalent to the difficulty of putting a man on the moon. After hearing Dr. Lawrence’s remark, I thought I would do some research. On May 25, 1961, before a special joint session of Congress, President John F. Kennedy announced his dramatic and ambitious …
Considerations in Certifying Sustainable Food
Guest post by Linda Prokopy and Belyna Bentlage Linda Prokopy is a Professor of Natural Resources Social Science and Belyna Bentlage is a Research Associate in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University. They conduct research on how to motivate farmers to adopt sustainable practices. There is an urgent and recognized need to address sustainability issues in agriculture, including but not limited to, soil health, greenhouse gas emissions, animal welfare, and water quality. The current trajectory of U.S. policy …
Protecting a Million Dollar Investment
If you owned a beach home valued at $1 million, would you rent your property with no stipulations, no written lease, and no demands on how the renters would care for your investment? That probably wouldn’t make much sense, would it? Yet that’s exactly what’s being done with thousands of acres of farmland owned by absentee landowners. Consider this: if a landowner has 160 acres and that parcel of land is worth $7,500 per acre, the landowner has a property investment valued in excess of $1 million! Absentee landowners and decision making Yet, …
What’s HUD got to do with it?
From time to time, I trade phone calls with an old acquaintance, Carl Palmquist. Carl served as a Commissioner of the Soil & Water Conservation District in Woodbury County (Iowa) during the time I worked for the Soil Conservation Service (now the NRCS). Carl and I often lament the decline of two very important federal programs, the Flood Control Act of 1944 (PL-534) and the Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Act of 1954 (PL-566). The Flood Control Act of 1944 authorizes the Secretary of Agriculture to install watershed …
Introduce a Little Anarchy
Follow along with this narrative: Installing conservation practices reduces in-field erosion. Reduced in-field erosion decreases the amount of sediment carried in a stream. Streams carrying less sediment have more energy. Streams with more energy result in additional streambank erosion. Added streambank erosion increases the sediment load in the stream. Ultimately the sediment load carried in the stream remains unchanged. In the end, applying upland conservation only shifts the source of the sediment load from upland erosion to …
Trial and Error Conservation is Expensive
A F150 4-wheel-drive truck... It was the first truck I owned. It ran like a top until the convulsions started; driving down the road it would shake violently. After that happened a few times, I knew I needed to seek professional help. When I told my mechanic about the convulsions he immediately concluded, “it’s your spark plugs”. Later that day when I picked up my truck he said, “I changed the spark plugs and that should take care of it”. I paid the bill. For the next week my truck drove great. He had fixed it, or did he? About a week …