It will take a lot to turn the massive ship of Big Agriculture around in Iowa, even if the benefits — from improved water quality to a more competitive food market — are many. It is important for those who reside in the city and are generations removed from farm work to understand the perils of the modern Big Ag system.
While farms tended by their own owners are few and far between, there’s still a strong community of hands-on farmers across Iowa providing a more sustainable model for growing food than industrial operations.
“Agriculture needs to stop pretending we don’t have problems and get busy focusing on solutions,” said Zack Smith, a farmer in north central Iowa. “It is not just good for other people downstream or people in the city, but it is good for the farm, too. That’s the thing I think people fail to realize a lot of the time: that a lot of these improvements are better for everyone.”
Smith utilizes stock cropping to grow Iowa’s signature plants, corn and soybeans, across 1,200 acres in Winnebago County.
Stock cropping, according to Smith, “is the process of planting a cash crop like corn every 20 feet and interlacing it with a pasture strip every 20 feet. You replicate the pattern across the field. On the pasture strips, you raise three or four different species of animals.”
A solar-powered, autonomous grazing barn moves the animals throughout the pasture, distributing manure, reducing the need for synthetic nutrients by 80 percent and contributing to a 30 percent increase in yield. The runoff most harmful to water quality — nitrates in animal waste — are immediately taken up by the pasture.
2023 Stock Cropper first brunch is served. Good to be back in the field makin bacon. pic.twitter.com/6kHJQEpt1D
— Stock Cropper (@zebulousprime) July 2, 2023
While stock cropping currently only takes up five or six acres on the farm, Smith employs other sustainable practices. He strip-tills his entire field, leaving space between each row of crops. When the time is just right to add nitrogen to fertilize the corn — a process called “side-dressing” — he applies it to the strip right beside the plants. Other farmers tend to apply anhydrous ammonia in the fall, leading to a greater chance of nitrates entering the watershed. This prevents the need to turn up the soil, reducing surface erosion, while giving crops a more efficient means of accessing nutrients.
“I put about a third of nitrogen down with planter and two thirds at side-dress when the corn is taking off,” he explained.
In addition to efficiently using his nitrogen, Smith has utilized cover crops on all his acres since 2014. He plants cereal rye in the fall to help reduce wind erosion on this strip-till land, suck up excess nitrates and stimulate soil biology.
On a much smaller, more colorful plot of land to the southeast, Molly Schintler helps grow food for her neighbors as a part of the team at Echollective Farm in Mechanicsville. This 50-acre farm grows diverse vegetables, occasionally cultivating 10-15 acres of flowers and mushrooms as well. Most of the yield is sold at farmers markets in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, distributed through a 120-member community supported agriculture (CSA) program, sold in grocery stores or used in restaurant kitchens, including at Cornell College.
“We aren’t certified organic, but we do use organic practices, meaning we don’t spray, never have, never will spray synthetic pesticides or herbicides,” Schintler explained.
Echollective utilizes crop rotation to maximize their yields, as “different crops take different nutrients from the soil.” Rotating the crops grown each season also helps reduce pest and weed problems.
In addition to avoiding chemicals and rotating crops, Echollective also leaves wild spaces full of native plants and animals to help pollinators thrive.
These different sustainable practices have been transformative. As Schintler said, “The makeup of the soil has completely changed over the last 20-plus years.”
She noted how, after years of row crop farming on the land, there were no earthworms — a key ingredient in any healthy soil. After years using these sustainable practices, Schintler said, “We get a good rain and there are those worm holes everywhere because the soil is so alive.”
Jeff Olson said his fields see plenty of worms as well. Olson farms over 1,300 acres in the Winfield-Swedesburg area of Henry County, utilizing erosion-mitigating techniques such as waterways, no-till farming and cover crops, which emulate the prairie by covering the ground all year in diverse species with varied root depths.
“The earthworms love cover crops, and soils are a lot more crumbly,” he said, noting that organic farms tend to stay greener longer in the spring.
Farming for the future requires regular education and a willingness to adapt. Smith’s stock cropping innovation was inspired by seeing other farmers find success with strip intercropping, he said. But other Iowa farmers — or, specifically, landowners — willing to try something totally new can be few and far between.
“You have to drive 60 miles to find the next village idiot that’s wanting to do some wild stuff,” Smith said. “The people who think this way are not the people scaling acres in Iowa.”
“It is as much about the people and community, and building that in a very sustainable way that places equity at the center, as it is about the land,” Schintler said of Echollective’s approach to farming.
Olson agreed: “I wish we weren’t so darn focused on money and ‘bigger is better.’”
He also believes in better utilizing Iowa land. “There’s a lot of wasted ground in Iowa that we could be farming and growing vegetables in … We don’t have to ship [in] produce from California year ’round.
“We need more farmers to do it right.”
The last question, “What do they wish they could change about agriculture in Iowa?” was the toughest for all the farmers. Each of them paused after hearing it because they know the struggles in the current system of agriculture in Iowa, and how it affects not only farmers but citizens.
Smith answered, “I wish I could change Farm Bill policy that would alter the demographic makeup of who controls Iowa land and how it is farmed and maintained because we’ve lost a third of our topsoil over the last 140 years of farming or whatever.” This unsustainable soil loss led him to say, “We need to build in the external costs that are not included, things like the cost of water quality of, you know, what is going down the river, the cost of soil loss from — in my opinion — what are poorer farming practices that increase that.” He sees taxation, or something like it, as a way to correct this problem.
He also highlighted the need to get fresh blood into the farming industry, attracting young people to replace some of the many “guys that are 80 years old” collecting “subsidized crop insurance.”
“I would love to see land ownership or those who are farming better reflect the racial diversity we see in our population,” Schintler noted, adding, “There is a really promising way forward with more cooperative and collaborative models of land ownership and business.”
Water quality was also an important part of agriculture to change for Schintler because she believes there is not a future in which water quality can stay the same. Sustainability not only protects the bottom line by preserving Iowa’s lucrative soil, but prevents the poisoning of the streams, rivers and gulfs humans rely on to survive.
“When we think about caring for the Earth through farming,” Schintler said, “it is just as important to think about caring for people in the community.”
Sean Dengler is an Urbandale-based writer and member of the Practical Farmers of Iowa, an organization that does excellent work highlighting sustainable agricultural practices and allowing like-minded farmers to share and learn from each other’s ideas. This article was originally published in Little Village’s July 2023 issue.
