Using the Past to Create a Sustainable Future for Agriculture:
Environmental and Social Landscape Change in Iowa

Principal Investigators: Paul W. Brown and Lisa A. Schulte, Iowa State University, Ames, IA

Issue At Hand There is growing recognition that intensive row-crop agriculture’s predominantly uniform landscape lacks both environmental resilience and socioeconomic sustainability. At the same time, the emerging bioeconomy provides an opportunity to redirect federal farm policy to achieve objectives that benefit the environment and society at both national and global scales. Future policy initiatives must consider the historical outcomes of previous policies, current socioeconomic and environmental issues, and a future vision related to agricultural and rural sustainability. In this interdisciplinary study, we used a combination of ecological and social techniques to examine the question: What linkages exist between environmental and social landscape change in rural Iowa?
		What We Hope to Accomplish Our objectives were to: • Holistically understand agricultural landscapes as linked socio-ecological systems by investigating the strength of linkages between agroecosystem and farm community change over time; • Assess the magnitude, rate, and direction of change in land cover for the purposes of understanding how landscape diversity and spatial complexity have changed over time; and • Understand the role of U.S. Farm Bill policy as a key driver of land-use and land-cover change over five policy eras.
How We Go About It Our study areas were composed of three Iowa townships, as defined by the rectangular survey system. Each township encompasses a small incorporated town that would have sustained a rural market center and associated community life in 1930. We used historical-comparative research design principles to guide the overall direction of the exploratory, descriptive, and explanatory components of this study. Metrics were derived from aerial photographs, agricultural censuses, and demographic censuses across five time periods between 1930 and 2002. Time periods coincided with major farm policy eras: (1) The Great Depression & the New Deal: 1930 -1940, (2) War, Peace, & Plenty: 1941-1955, (3) Soil Bank & Food Security: 1956-1970, (4) Plant Fencerow to Fencerow: 1971-1985, and (5) Budget Concerns & New Approaches:1986-2002.

What We Found

Overall results showed that fostering the diversification rather than the further homogenization of agricultural landscapes was more likely to achieve the common goal of enhancing rural vitality. More heterogeneous landscapes could be expected to create more opportunities for the next generation of Iowa farmers and foster economic development. Ways to get there might include:

• Reintegrating livestock and crop enterprises to once again capture production synergies;
• Introducing more crops or different cropping systems, consistent with the natural resource limitations of agricultural landscapes, to support existing or emerging markets for
  food, fiber, and fuel;and
• Assisting rural communities assess infrastructure needs in support of existing or emerging markets for agricultural goods and services.

To facilitate these new opportunities, a new approach to U.S. Farm Bill policy is needed. Historically, U.S. Farm Bill policy has employed a “command and control” resource management paradigm intent on isolating and controlling target variables (i.e., income stability on farms, commodity supply management, and soil protection). At the same time, non-target variables (i.e., environmental and social landscape factors) have unintentionally been allowed to slowly change, resulting in the overall erosion of agroecosystem resiliency. Because there is a growing sense that new Farm Bill policy approaches are needed to facilitate the transition to agricultural sustainability, methods that engage broader stakeholder groups and employ multidisciplinary perspectives are more likely to address the once non-target variables that are now visibly important (e.g., environmental degradation and rural community decline). Relinquishing command and control and instead adopting an adaptive management strategy, which acknowledges that human policies are designed to meet social objectives and must be continually modified and be flexible for adaptation to changing conditions, may provide the solution.

This research has been funded by the Iowa State University and the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research at the University of Iowa. For more information, please contact us directly Paul Brown (pwbrown@iastate.edu) or Lisa Schulte (laschulte@iastate.edu), or see Paul's dissertation:

Brown, P.W. 2008. Using the past to create a sustainable future for agriculture: environmental and social landscape change in Iowa. Ph.D. Dissertation, Iowa State University, Ames, IA.