Right now, the Twin Cities is home to over 200 community gardens and several urban farms. They provide food for families, beautify neighborhoods, protect our water, educate youth, create stable neighborhoods by decreasing crime and increasing social connections, and empower community leaders.

But while community gardens and urban farms are now a growing part of our city, they are a much smaller part than they were in recent history. Take for example the 1940s, when Victory Gardens were tended by city dwellers and occupying everything from vacant lots to school grounds to railroad rights-of-way, and provided as much as 40 percent of the fresh produce consumed locally. There is so much potential in the land we have around us.

I am a member of the Land Stewardship Project, which, in conjunction with Gardening Matters, is working to focus on the importance of securing access to land for community gardening and urban agriculture. Recently, I met with 20 community garden leaders. In these conversations, I heard from gardeners about land access arrangements that work well for them and the benefits that come when they have long term stability.

I have also talked to many gardeners who are at risk of being shut down because of land tenure uncertainty. Questions about future access to a plot of land fractures the relationship between the grower and the soil that is key to a sustainable food system. Struggling to make sure the garden will not be shut down takes valuable energy away from other garden activities.

Yet a significant challenge for community gardens and other types of urban agriculture is gaining long term access to land.

Everything from economics and misperceptions about food production, to outdated or misapplied government policies threaten the permanency of community gardens and urban farms. It is clear to me that gardeners and urban farmers need clear options for gaining long term access to land.

As energy costs rise and our economy shifts, so too will the ways our food system operates—and clearly locally grown is a viable, healthy and popular option. But that requires securing land for urban agriculture—literally transforming our urban landscapes to promote a more sustainable food system.

Long term, stable access to land allows gardeners and farmers to invest their time and talents in the ongoing success of their garden or farm as a vibrant part of the community, local environment and our food system.

When land is available year after year for growing on, gardeners are better able to develop the soil through cover cropping and perennials, host bees and other beneficial insects, and build systems for composting and water collection. When gardeners are able to create permanent spaces for people to gather in, strong relationships are cultivated through familiarity and stability.

When people have long-term access to land, they are able to invite more people into the garden, and people can trust that such community spaces will be there for many years to come.

The Twin Cities is home to a wide range of gardens, farms and markets, and each will need a unique approach that works best for them. Not every garden or farm needs long term access, but those that do require clear strategies to get there.

Community gardens have found secure land access through developing long-term leases with landowners, and through strong relationships with the community that they call home. They have found good partners in neighborhood associations, churches, schools and parks all around the metro area, and these partners are sometimes open to hosting a community garden for many years. Gardening Matters offers training and assistance for developing these vital community relationships.

Developing the many potential pathways for land security requires a collaborative effort. One working group, which includes the Land Stewardship Project and Gardening Matters, as well as several other local organizations, urban gardeners and farmers, has been exploring strategies for long-term access to land.

If you would like to learn more about this initiative or want to get involved, contact LSP or Gardening Matters at 612-492-8964 for more information.

I want to see the goal of long-term access to land realized for the community gardens and urban farms of the Twin Cities. Reaching this goal will be a key step toward transforming our local food system and our urban landscapes. So, the next time you walk by a community garden, stop in, say hello, and learn more about it, the food it produces and the people who are making it happen!

Megan Smith recently served an internship with the Land Stewardship Project’s Community Based Food and Economic Development Program.

Humble Expert Example No. 1
There’s little doubt Jon Stravers is one of the region’s top experts on birds, particularly raptors such as red-shouldered hawks. I first met him in June at a field day hosted by northeast Iowa farmer and LSP member Dan Specht.

Stravers, who is the Driftless Area Coordinator for the National Audubon Society’s Mississippi River Initiative, makes quite an impression. He’s the kind of person who has channeled his scientific expertise into an unflagging passion for preserving and improving the environment. That combination of passion and knowledge can be valuable in an eco-struggle, but it can also be a bit off-putting to farmers, who have to make a living on the land on a daily basis.

But Stravers told me about how a few years ago while doing research in some woods overlooking the Mississippi River town of McGregor, Iowa, he noticed that a dairy farm he had to walk through to get to the trees was full of bobolinks. This caught Stravers’ attention because bobolink populations have plummeted in recent decades. Audubon has listed them as one of North America’s eight most threatened birds, mostly because the Midwestern landscape has been converted on a wholesale basis from perennial grasses to annual crops like corn and soybeans.

The ever-observant Stravers also noticed he often had to modify his route through the farm because the fencing was being moved every few weeks. Could there be a connection between the wandering fencelines and the fluttering bobolinks?

Stravers started talking to the farmer, Phil Specht, who is Dan’s brother. It turns out there was a connection. All that fence movement is part of Phil’s managed rotational grazing system, which he uses to produce milk from a 170-cow herd. Managed rotational grazing has developed into a low-cost, profitable way for livestock farmers to produce meat and milk from grass. The added benefit is that all that grass provides good ground cover year-round, protecting water quality and building soil quality. And, as Stravers discovered, it also provides great habitat for grassland birds like bobolinks and meadowlarks.

Specht was delighted to learn from the expert that a farming system he was utilizing was good for the birds. Over the years he has created a rotational grazing system he tweaks throughout the growing season so that it  provides optimal forage for his cows while building the soil and reducing runoff on the steep hills of northeast Iowa (Specht provides a detailed description of his system in episode 82 of LSP’s Ear to the Ground podcast).

“It is incidental,” Specht told me about the added benefit his system provides birds. But Specht has a highly developed land ethic, one that is accentuated by a curious and open mind. So he’s modified his grazing system somewhat to make it even more friendly to grassland birds. “The expertise of Jon to note the benefits for birds just kind of gave me a little added incentive.”

And guess what? It still provides good feed for his cows throughout the growing season.

“It works,” Stravers says about the economic/environmental balance Specht has struck, adding that in the past he often thought production agriculture and environmental sustainability were mutually exclusive. No more. “Phil’s farm is a prime example of how agriculture and cow production can go along with bird populations and conservation. We’re both wanting long-term sustainability—me of bird populations and him of effective grasslands.”

As the recent LSP podcast interview of Specht and Stravers makes clear, these men have a ton of mutual respect for each other and are willing to participate in a lot of give-and-take conversations. Such a relationship can generate more innovation and forward momentum than any number of “I’m the expert, now listen to me” one-way lectures.

Humble Expert Example No. 2
This summer, Dennis Johnson wrapped up a four decades-plus career as a University of Minnesota dairy scientist. As I describe in the latest issue of the Land Stewardship Letter, Johnson executed a bit of an about-face around the midway point in his career.

In the 1980s he started questioning the automatic assumption (which is still widespread) that the more milk a farm produces, the greater the profit. He then began a search for an alternative to the high-input, high energy, highly-leveraged way of dairying.

This search led Dr. Johnson to do something that university scientists aren’t always so good at: he took his questions to farmers, and listened more than he talked.

“We weren’t used to that from the quote, unquote university experts, who usually came bearing the gifts of knowledge handed down from on high,” says western Minnesota beef producer Audrey Arner, one of those farmers Johnson sought out. “It was unusual and welcome.”

What Johnson learned from farmers like Arner was that managed rotational grazing could be a low-cost, profitable option for producing livestock in the Upper Midwest. He learned this from farmers who had been trying the system out pretty much on their own, with little help from university experts or the rest of the mainstream agricultural community.

But upon these pioneering farms, as well as farms in other countries where rotational grazing was being used, the scientist could see for himself this system was the real deal. He then took what he learned from the farmers and helped them make it even better adapted to this region. While interviewing Johnson for an LSP podcast (episode 81), I commented on how his experience showed farmers and scientists can have a two-way conversation about problems and innovations.

He corrected me: “Actually, it was one-way for many years, with the information coming from the farmers to us.”

As a result of his listening, in the wake of his retirement Johnson has left an impressive legacy at the U of M’s West Central Research and Outreach Center, which is now known nationally for its practical research into alternative livestock systems like managed rotational grazing.

School’s Always in Session
Stravers and Johnson are just two examples of how scientific expertise does not have to be a barrier to further learning. Unfortunately, such examples are rare, particularly at a time when education is geared toward producing “specialists” who can’t see outside their own thesis statements.

But it’s inspiring to know that there are “educated” lifelong students out there roaming the land with open ears and open eyes. Such an attitude is particularly valuable when we’re trying to bring about changes that don’t fit in the conventional framework of doing things.

“We’re learning, okay?” Stravers told me at the end of our interview near McGregor. “I’m the so-called expert, but you benefit from listening, from some other point of view. It’s definitely a learning process I appreciate.”

On Aug. 17, LSP farmer-members and staff will meet with Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson in Redwood Falls to discuss how to rein in corporate control in the livestock industries. Also participating in the meeting will be Lynn Hayes of Farmers’ Legal Action Group, Bill Bullard, head of R-CALF USA, and Rhonda Perry, livestock producer and director of the Missouri Rural Crisis Center.

The Aug. 17 meeting will feature  a discussion on how to provide input
on the USDA’s proposed rule before the Nov. 22 comment deadline.

LSP members and staff are also attending a Department of Justice/USDA workshop
Aug. 27 in Fort Collins, Colo., on livestock concentration issues. This is one of several such workshops being held across the country, and it represents the first time two cabinet members—U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder—have taken input directly from farmers on livestock concentration issues. This is a big deal.

Providing better enforcement criteria through the existing Packers and Stockyards
Act has long been sought after by LSP and allied farm groups who advocated for the inclusion of a rule-making directive in the 2008 Farm Bill.

LSP is encouraged to see a proposed rule being released for comments by farmers and other members of the public. Consolidation and vertical integration within the livestock industry has created a playing field ripe for abuse in which corporate meatpackers and large integrators manipulate markets, stifle competition and limit the options of a broad range of both independent and contract livestock producers.

One thing is clear — farmers are increasingly working harder for less than their fair
share, while corporate packers continue to consolidate both profits and control.

One telling fact: according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service, the share of
the consumer dollar received by America’s cattle and hog producers has dropped consistently and substantially over the past 25 years as corporate control over our food and agriculture system has accelerated.

For the average livestock producer, the proposed rule heads in the right direction, but should be seen as a start, not a finish. While not a cure-all for the ills of anticompetitive behavior and undue corporate influence in livestock markets, the new rule, when implemented, can address some of the egregious practices of meatpackers that farmers face.

Not surprisingly, the American Meat Institute (AMI) — the lobbying consortium for the nation’s biggest meatpackers — has come out blasting the rule. AMI members such as Cargill, Tyson, JBS and others are causing harm to America’s farmers and rural communities by providing undue preference and unfair advantages to preferred operators, which oftentimes include their own production operations.

Clearly, AMI and corporate meatpackers will fight the proposed rule and indeed any federal action that might hamper their ability to squeeze farmers and manipulate livestock procurement and pricing.

Just as predictably, the leadership of commodity groups such as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Pork Producers Council are
following the corporate meatpackers’ lead, voicing worn-out arguments as they prioritize their allegiance with packers rather than everyday working farmers.

While a fuller analysis is being conducted, LSP believes that the rule is a good
step forward but much more is needed. Our livestock-producing members are hopeful the series of USDA/Department of Justice workshops taking place across the country to solicit input on competition issues in agriculture will embolden Congress and the Obama Administration to take additional measures to create fair and competitive markets for farmers and consumers.

In terms of the new rule, of particular significance is USDA’s firm assertion that
farmers do not have to show competitive injury to the entire marketplace for an action to constitute a violation of the Packers and Stockyards Act. This is contrary to some recent court decisions, which have ruled that a farmer must essentially show harm to competition in general as well as injury to himself or herself in order to prove a violation of the Act.

In addition to our ongoing analysis of the proposed rule, LSP is reaching out to thousands of livestock farmers during the comment period. We will be gathering input, encouraging involvement, and not only discussing the new rule but also what other actions should be taken in farm country to ensure fair and competitive markets.

For details on how to make a comment on the proposed rule before Nov. 22  via e-mail or regular mail, click here, or contact LSP’s Adam Warthesen at 612-722-6377.

As a January report by LSP and PANNA documents, the EPA review process that led to atrazine’s U.S. re-approval a few years ago was marred by numerous closed-door meetings involving Syngenta and EPA officials. That review was also characterized by a lack of independent research and suppression of scientific studies that showed significant health and environmental problems associated with the herbicide.

When the EPA announced last fall that it was doing a new year-long review of atrazine, there was hope that this one would be less tainted by corporate influence than the previous process (the agency is expected to announce its new findings in September).

But the Huffington Post report raises serious “here we go again” concerns. According to EPA records obtained by the website’s journalists, more than 80 percent of the studies the EPA is using in its review haven’t even been published. That means  independent scientists probably haven’t provided those unpublished reports the “peer review” needed to ensure they are scientifically sound.

Even more troubling is that several prominent published studies, including some by widely recognized atrazine expert Tyrone Hayes, are not on the EPA’s review list. Hayes, as you may recall, is not popular with the chemical industry or its supporters within the government (including here in Minnesota) for his willingness to speak out about his research showing problems in amphibians exposed to extremely low levels of atrazine.

The agribusiness community may not like Hayes’ outspoken nature, but the fact is his research has been published in prestigious scientific journals such as Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They deserve consideration.

One EPA analyst told the Huffington Post that research by Hayes and other scientists that’s related to amphibians isn’t being included in the review process because the government lacks “protocols for testing on frogs.” Maybe it’s time such protocols are developed, considering that in states like Minnesota atrazine is the number one pesticide contaminant of  surface and groundwater.

Perhaps the most troubling point made in the Huffington Post investigation is that EPA officials seem to have no problem relying on industry-funded pesticide research. In fact, one official said in the article that since industry has more money to throw at research, it’s likely its results will be more thorough than what turns up in, for example, university labs.

Let’s summarize this philosophy: since corporations like Syngenta have the most money (which by the way was produced from selling chemicals like atrazine), then their science trumps research done in the public realm using public dollars— supposedly for the public good.

In the old days, we called that a conflict of interest.

Those hands belong to southeast Minnesota crop and livestock farmer Duane Hager, and I snapped that photo 15 years ago. When I came upon the image recently while doing some filing, I was reminded of how fun it is to spend time with someone who takes  an intense interest in something, then through observation and experimentation learns every last detail about it. And finally, they use that acquired knowledge to protect and improve the object of their passion.

I can’t count how many times over the past decade and a half  I’ve had a double handful of soil held up to me by a farmer who’s proud of its smell, look and feel. But Duane Hager was the first. I remember we were driving around his farm on a summer day while I interviewed him about soil quality for the Land Stewardship Letter. Suddenly, he stopped in one of those fields that wraps itself around the hilly southeast Minnesota landscape. It was clear he was saving this stop for last, and like a showman putting a climatic exclamation point on a performance, he dug up a spadeful of rich loam and held it up to the camera. Nothing more needed to be said—the interview was done.

So what a delight it was to catch up with Hager recently and discover that he was just as excited as ever about what we philistines dare to call “dirt.”

When I gave Hager a call, he repeated in so many words what he had first told me during my 1995 interview: It all starts and ends with the soil. That philosophy has allowed him to use the soil’s own defenses to ward off that bane of crop farmers in the Upper Midwest: weeds. In his quarter-century of farming just three miles from the Mississippi River, Hager has never used herbicides. Yet his corn yields are competitive with his neighbors’. In fact, the soft-spoken farmer is a bit of a legend among producers in the region who are trying to figure out how to raise row crops without chemical weed control.

Hager and his wife Susie milk 40 cows and raise 30 beef brood cows. They farm 200 acres of corn, soybeans, alfalfa hay and small grains such as wheat, oats and barley. Hager is not certified organic, and he doesn’t strike me as being adamantly opposed to any and all chemicals. But he says he’s never been tempted to utilize herbicides to control weeds simply because, well, he doesn’t see them as necessary when the soil is healthy.

“When you don’t use chemicals you don’t have the cost,” Hager said. “Also, I feel if you can maintain the health of the soil you shouldn’t need the crutch of chemicals.”

Hager is working constantly to build his soil using diverse rotations and natural mineral amendments. He doesn’t see his soil as simply a plant stand for the corn and other crops, but as a living environment that affects everything from what weeds are present to how the finished product influences the health of his livestock.

Soil tests are important to Hager, and he’s learned over the years that such tests can show not only that fields differ from each other, but also that soil characteristics can vary within the same field. For example, he’s recently been having a problem with jimson weed. (“It’s nasty, real nasty,” he says.) It tends to cluster on only certain parts of his fields, although Hager knows the seed bank for that pest plant is probably spread throughout his farm.

“We tested the soil last week where jimson weed really likes to grow, and then tested where it’s not a problem at all,” the farmer said. “I’m going to compare those soil samples to see what minerals are different. I’ve read it could be a calcium deficiency that jimson thrives on. I guess jimson doesn’t like calcium.”

Hager monitors his soil’s health in less scientific ways as well. He knows it’s healthy and not compacted when it’s crumbly and implements pull easily during fieldwork. He also looks for signs of life.

“I watch what’s going on in this soil pretty hard. When I check the planter, I can always see earthworms. Once I walked no more than six feet into my neighbor’s field and I couldn’t find any earthworms. It was amazing I could walk that short a distance and it made that much of a difference.”

Of course, even the healthiest soil produces weeds. Hager controls weeds during the growing season by, among other things, planting later in the spring than many of his neighbors. This means the soil is warmer and the corn plants get a jump on the weeds, providing a healthy canopy that can shade out the plant pests.

Hager feels he can farm the way he does without herbicides because of his relatively small scale—it allows him to manage each field individually and to adjust his methods accordingly. It also allows him to ask the kinds of questions that are moot when the answer is pre-determined by a chemical company.

“I’m always tweaking things and learning,” the farmer told me, making it clear yet again that he enjoys the pursuit of knowledge as much as what it actually leads to. “When I have a weed problem, my first question is, ‘What’s wrong with the soil?’ ”

“Yes, I was interested in the trout,” he told me as we stood on his crop and livestock farm eight miles from Big Spring on a stormy June afternoon. “But I was really interested in the spring. And then I found out our home farm was in the Big Spring basin, and so it made me think that what we do on this farm affects the water that comes out of Big Spring.”

Sometimes it’s difficult to make a direct connection between farming practices and their impact on the environment. This is particularly true when it comes to the effect crop and livestock production has on groundwater, which even scientists will admit keeps a lot of secrets from we surface dwellers.

But farmers and other rural residents in Jeff Klinge’s region southeast of the Iowa community of Decorah have a better idea than most about the relationships between farming systems and water quality. That’s because the Big Spring Basin is one of the most well known and studied sites in the U.S. when it comes to information on groundwater contamination in a landscape dominated by porous limestone rock, otherwise known as karst.

Research in the basin, which is named after the spring that emerges at the DNR hatchery before emptying into the Turkey River, has turned up some bad news: since the 1960s nitrate levels in the basin’s water have been a consistent pollution problem. This is a direct result of more and more of the watershed’s land area being planted to corn, which relies heavily on nitrogen fertilizer. These corn plantings have come at the expense of pastures, woods, small grains and even hay fields—all plant systems that help maintain good water quality.

As Big Spring Trout Hatchery fisheries biologist Gary Siegwarth explained to me in the podcast, he sees the spring, as well as the nearby Turkey River, as barometers of what is taking place on the surrounding landscape. These days, that barometer is calling for a good chance of cloudy water.

“For example, we had just a little over an inch of rain last night, and even with that relatively small amount of rain that water looks so turbid,” he said while checking out the spring and the river at the hatchery. The spring had the transparency of washing machine gray water, and the river was chocolate brown. “That’s not sustainable,” said Siegwarth.

Over the years, the Big Spring Demonstration Project has worked with farmers to reduce nitrogen fertilizer contamination through such practices as conservation tillage, diverse crop rotations, better fertility management and well-managed grazing systems. It’s had some success, but more work is needed if the ground and surface water in the area is to approach the quality levels needed for a healthy watershed.

That’s why on the day I was in the area, Siegwarth was participating in an event sponsored by Practical Farmers of Iowa and Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service, among others. The field day helped farmers see for themselves the direct relationships between land use and water quality. But it was also held so that Siegwarth could learn what farmers like Jeff Klinge are doing to keep places like Big Spring cleaner.

“Whenever I do something on the farm, it’s because of the Big Spring Basin,” said Klinge, who recently dropped soybeans from his cropping system because they were too erosive in this hilly part of Iowa.

During the past few decades Klinge and his wife Deb Tidwell have taken several steps to reduce harmful runoff, including diversifying their crop rotation and converting to a certified organic system. They and the other farmers who are utilizing sustainable crop and livestock systems in the area made it clear during the field day that they want to do their best to be good stewards of places like Big Spring, but that they face significant economic, political, even cultural, challenges.

“It definitely made me feel good that these people are out there—they’re trying to do the right thing,” Siegwarth said afterwards. “Now how do we connect them further and help them battle against the bigger machine?”

Rubashkin was sentenced for his role in a financial fraud scandal that came to light just over two years ago after an immigration raid at Agriprocessors, which was a kosher meat packing plant operated by his family. The facility was opened in the northeast Iowa farm community in 1987 after Hasidic Jews from New York bought a shuttered plant. During the next two decades Agriprocessors became the largest kosher meat processing facility in the U.S.

And the town became an ongoing experiment in what happens when cultures mix—or don’t—in a small community. With the arrival of the Hasidic Jews and the workers from south of the border and elsewhere, Postville suddenly found itself being labeled one of Iowa’s most ethnically diverse communities. This diversity didn’t always make for smooth relations between the newcomers (as well as amongst the newcomers) and those who considered themselves “native” Postvillians. Recent books with titles like Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America and Postville, U.S.A.: Surviving Diversity in Small-Town America are self-explanatory as to the tension created in the community.

To say the least, the largest workplace raid in Iowa’s history—it involved the arrest of almost one-third of the plant’s 968 workers—did not help matters any. The event provided a glimpse at everything from the terrible working conditions in meat packing plants and how even child labor laws are sometimes violated, to the prevalence of methamphetamine in such facilities and the shortsightedness of having a local economy rely too heavily on one employer (Postville saw its population of 2,800 drop by roughly 1,000 within a year of the raid, according to the town’s mayor). The Agriprocessors debacle, and how it was handled by the authorities, was also just one more example of how broken our immigration system is.

Last year,  Canadian-based Agri Star bought the plant, spent millions of dollars modernizing it, promised to treat workers well and began processing kosher chicken, turkey and beef. It remains to be seen how this latest twist will turn out for the people—newcomers and old-timers alike—of Postville. However, I thought it was a good sign that when interviewed by Radio Iowa recently, Agri Star CEO Hershey Friedman said it made sense to keep kosher production in the town because, “people who have expertise in kosher processing have made Postville their home.”

He’s right. And it’s good to be reminded that despite all of the turmoil, despite all of the question marks about the future, despite all of the unflattering books written, Postville is still home to people who came there—recently and not so recently—for various reasons, and have stayed through thick and thin. After the immigration cops and TV cameras leave town, these people have to get along if the community is to survive.

As I tucked into that burrito while sitting next to a picture window at the Taste of Mexico, behind me a group of  whip-thin Somalis—two men and one woman–were having an animated conversation in their native tongue while sipping Mountain Dew. The restaurant is housed in a beautiful, if slightly run-down, stone building that was once the home of “Luhman & Sanders,” a dry goods store that dated back to the 1800s.

The men took turns walking out to the sidewalk for a smoke, passing through a bright entry-way where on the floor the words “Luhman & Sanders” were spelled out in ancient black and white tiles. While one of the men paced the sidewalk in the June heat, two blond, well-dressed women greeted him as they walked by.

A stocky guy in his 30s with a sun burnt face and the jocular disposition of a beer salesman walked in carrying a neon “Bud Light” sign. “I got it fixed,” he said to the friendly Mexican waitress as she fetched him a ladder. He mounted the sign in the picture window and fiddled with it to make it straight, stepping off the ladder periodically to eye it from a distance.

Meanwhile, the three Somalis finally walked out the front door together, one of the men carrying a take-out clam shell and the woman  still sipping her Mountain Dew.

The beer man plugged-in the sign, returned the ladder and walked to his van parked across the street. Before getting in, he turned and took one last look at his handiwork. As he drove off, a farmer in a pickup took his parking spot, jumped out and walked into John’s Hardware Center.

I paid up and walked out to my car, a little groggy from the meal and the muggy heat. As I backed out of my space, an older bearded man wearing the garb of a traditional Jew—a black suit and fedora— walked past the restaurant.

Inside, the waitress seated a middle-aged white couple under the repaired Bud sign.

The National Resources Inventory is conducted by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and is probably the best gauge we have of soil erosion trends nationally. It combines field observations with remote sensing on non-federal land to develop its numbers.

According to the latest NRI, between 1982 and 2007, average water-caused erosion on cropland dropped from 4 tons per acre per year to 2.7 tons; annual wind erosion rates fell from 3.3 tons per acre to 2.1 tons.

Keep in mind soil scientists estimate that a soil erosion rate of around 5 tons per acre annually is “tolerable,” meaning a farmer can maintain crop productivity as long as the rate doesn’t rise higher. Whether it’s tolerable in the bigger scheme of things is another question.

A lot of factors can be credited for these nationwide drops in erosion rates. For one, farmers, some of the most innovative land managers around, have shown once again that when given the chance they can produce food in a way that doesn’t wreck future productivity. They adopted no-till, ridge till and other methods that reduce disturbance of the soil in droves, particularly during the 1990s.

And the USDA’s 1985  conservation compliance initiative, which required farmers to put in place certain measures if they wanted to keep receiving commodity program benefits, no doubt helped as well.

Finally, the Conservation Reserve Program deserves a big pat on the back. It was created by the 1985 Farm Bill, and by 2007 CRP had paid farmers not to crop some tens of millions of acres of environmentally sensitive land.

But—you knew that was coming—here are a few caveats to consider when looking over the NRI numbers:

• We have a little bit of the “low-hanging fruit syndrome” going on here. The bulk of the soil erosion reductions occurred between 1987 and 1997—erosion rates went from 2.79 billion tons annually to 1.89 billions tons during that 10-year period. According to the NRI, since 1997 we’ve seen those gains in erosion control flatten out somewhat (in 2007 we lost 1.73 billion tons of soil). But the trend lines are still headed in the right direction.

• New development took about 40 million acres of farmland during the 25-year period this NRI report covers. The acreage of prime farmland converted to other uses such as development is bigger than the area covered by Vermont and New Hampshire combined. It’s mighty hard to raise food on concrete—or to get precipitation to soak into that concrete and recharge aquifers.

•What will happen if farmers are tempted to switch more CRP acres back into crop production (as they have been doing recently) or if the federal government significantly cuts the program? What if CRP payment rates simply can’t compete with rising cash crop rental rates?

• One last caveat—and this is a big one: the latest NRI does not take into account what happened after 2007, when record crop prices made it even more attractive to plow up pastures and CRP land, and perhaps even drop a crop or two out of the rotation.

Anecdotal evidence is that in some localized areas at least, we’ve seen significant increases in erosion rates during the past two years. Weather events such as the 2007 and 2008 flooding in the blufflands and eastern Iowa, respectively, are the cause of some of that.

But raising corn-on-corn in intensive conditions may also be a factor. In fact, just a year ago some southwest Minnesota farmers were making troubling comparisons to the Dust Bowl when talking about wind erosion in area crop fields.

Let’s hope the latest NRI accomplishes two tasks: 1) allows farmers and conservationists to take pride in what they’ve accomplished; 2) puts us all on notice that we can’t take these gains for granted.

In June 2008 massive storms hit parts of southern Minnesota and eastern Iowa, sending the Cedar into a destructive frenzy of historical proportions. As it happens, while taking a break from reading A Watershed Year: Anatomy of the Iowa Floods of 2008 the other day, I ran across the announcement that the main “character” in the book, the Cedar, has just been named one of the nation’s most endangered waterways by the group American Rivers. “Outdated flood management and poor watershed planning” were cited as the reasons for the ranking.

The Cedar has its headwaters in southeast Minnesota’s Dodge County, and it flows through some of our richest farmland before cutting a wide, crescent-shaped swath through a major part of eastern Iowa. That makes we Minnesotans partially responsible for the tremendous damage and heartache the Cedar has caused our neighbors downstream.

The Cedar has experienced a “500 year flood” twice during the past 15 years—giving that part of Iowa two of its worst river-related catastrophes. When the river went out of its banks in 1993, people thought they’d never see anything like it again in their lifetimes. But in 2008, it did happen again. Virtually all of eastern Iowa was affected, but the area around Iowa City and Cedar Rapids was perhaps the worst. At one point the water flow through the latter city reached 140,000 cubic feet per second, nearly double the earlier record flood flow in 1961.

Homes, businesses and institutions were wrecked and lives ruined. The floods also did a major number on farmland. In fact, part of the damage caused by that flooding can be traced back to farmland, or, more accurately, how it is managed. As Laura Jackson and Dennis Kenney write in A Watershed Year: “A drop of rain that falls in Iowa has a 63 percent chance of falling on a corn or soybean field. If we look just at northern Iowa, where farming is most intensive, that probability rises to 88 percent.”

In July, August and September, all those corn and soybean fields provide plenty of ground cover. But the flood occurred in mid-June, when row-cropped fields have yet to develop a good canopy that can protect the land’s surface from torrential rains. Water dropping from the sky can be like a hydraulic hammer on bare ground: the power of raindrops on one acre of land in the Midwest is equal to the energy found in 20 tons of TNT. The root systems of row crops are also not well established in mid-June, leaving fields vulnerable to the scouring effect of flood waters.

Soil scientists estimate that a soil erosion rate of around five tons per acre annually is “tolerable,” meaning a farmer can maintain crop productivity as long as the rate doesn’t rise higher. Five tons roughly translates to the thickness of a dime uniformly covering an acre of land. According to  A Watershed Year, the 2008 floods loosened as much as 50 tons per acre in some Iowa townships. That ain’t chump change.

It’s also not surprising. Various studies have shown that storm events are major sources of farm field erosion. In a landmark 1997 paper published in the  Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, soil scientists pointed out that in fact such storm events are the major cause of soil erosion. The authors of the paper went on to argue that land management systems must be adjusted to deal with such erosion events. That doesn’t mean that a significant amount of soil isn’t lost on a routine basis. But big storm events can accelerate things considerably, particularly if they come at just the wrong time—when crops are short and provide very little ground cover, for example. And relatively recent changes in our climate seem to favor spring and early summer storm events (more on that later).

Let’s face it: when a storm event of that magnitude hits an area, even the best ag conservation practices aren’t going to be enough to prevent some above-normal erosion. We certainly saw that in southeast Minnesota and southwest Wisconsin during the flooding that took place in August 2007. But the theme that emerges from the various essays in A Watershed Year is that there are steps we can take to mitigate such damage.

Much of Iowa, like southern Minnesota, has had its wetlands, deep-rooted prairies and other natural areas replaced by intense plantings of row crops that only cover the soil a few months out of the year. That makes the land much less hydrologically resilient, write Jackson and Keeney. They, as well as other authors in A Watershed Year, recommend bringing perennial plant systems back to key parts of the landscape to help slow down and soak up water.

This doesn’t mean establishing a blanket of bluestem from Austin to Iowa City and banning farming in the Cedar River watershed. Great strides have been made in recent years to utilize managed rotational grazing, diverse crop rotations and other sustainable systems to balance agricultural production with environmental protection on working lands.

Returning perennials to key, particularly sensitive portions of agricultural watersheds can produce impressive results. For example, Jackson and Keeney cite an Iowa study where prairie strips covering just 10 to 20 percent of a field were able to reduce sediment loss by 95 percent, according to preliminary results. Modeling research right here in Minnesota has shown that diversifying portions of intensely row-cropped watersheds in the western and southeastern part of the state can vastly improve water quality, while returning some balance to the hydrological cycle.

It’s also time to examine whether a major land use like agriculture is prepared to meet the challenges of a changing climate. As A Watershed Year points out, one new climate wrinkle is that we’re getting our precipitation in a different manner. Nice steady showers that have a chance to soak in without creating damaging runoff are increasingly rare. That means conservation methods and structures such as conservation tillage and terracing may not be able to handle these intense, infrequent storm events. As soil scientist Jerry Hatfield once told me: “We have conservation measures that were built for a climate scenario we no longer have.”

There’s no doubt changes in land use can help make rivers like the Cedar less dangerous. But A Watershed Year also points out the limits to what humans can do. In fact, I found the book’s argument that we should stop treating floods as “abnormal events” its most intriguing proposal—and perhaps its toughest to accept.

“Floods are what rivers do,” writes Cornelia Mutel in the book’s introduction. “Floods are one component of the water cycle, a process as ancient and necessary as any of nature’s cycles…Floods become a problem only because we choose to live and place objects of value in a river’s extended channel—that is, in its floodplain.”

That reminds me of a passage in John McPhee’s classic geology tome, Annals of the Former World. At one point he quotes geologist Anita Epstein describing how change on the landscape is not always as slow and constant (think glaciers) as we might think. “The evolution of the world does not happen a grain at a time. It happens in the hundred-year storm, the hundred-year flood,” Epstein tells McPhee.

When put in that context, it makes it easier to accept that maybe we shouldn’t be issuing building permits or raising corn in every last acre of bottomland. As Kamyar  Enshayan, the director of Center for Energy & Environmental Education at the University of Northern Iowa who happens to be a member of the Cedar Falls City Council told the Washington Post: “Cities routinely build in the flood plain. That’s not an act of God; that’s an act of City Council.”

The answer to that question will determine if farm to school efforts become not just a series of short-term experiments, but a regular part of institutional cafeterias.  A vote for the latter  came from the direction of our nation’s Capitol last week when the National Farm to School Act of 2010 (H.R. 5456) was introduced by U.S. Representatives Betty McCollum (D-MN), Tom Latham (R-IA) and Bobby Scott (D-VA). The bill has 22 original co-sponsors, including Representatives Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Tim Walz (D-MN).

A central component of H.R. 5456 is a competitive matching grant program of up to $100,000 to support planning, implementation, training and technical assistance for communities to implement farm to school programs. The legislation would also direct the USDA to identify existing federal programs that can be used to facilitate participation of small- and medium-sized farmers in farm to school programs. It would create an online exchange so that data on farm to school programs is widely available and good ideas can be shared nationwide.

The timing couldn’t be better. Farm to school programs have taken off in Minnesota. An estimated 69 school districts now have programs, which is more than double the number of Minnesota districts with farm to school initiatives in 2008.

But the majority of these initiatives are still in the tentative, experimental phase. I saw one of these efforts firsthand in April while collecting information for a recent Land Stewardship Letter article on farm to school. Tiny (82 students) Ridgeway Community School in rural southeast Minnesota has been sourcing food from some 10 local farmers since September. With the help of government grants, a lot of parent volunteer time, and the foraging skills of LSP organizer Caroline van Schaik, the school has proven that food produced by local farms using sustainable methods can be served in a small cafeteria.

Locally produced food is far from a major presence in the Ridgeway lunchroom. It’s estimated that during the 2009-2010 school year the school spent around $2,000 on local foods out of an approximately $8,500 budget. But for a relatively modest investment, the school has proven one can make local, sustainably-raised food a consistent part of lunch, not just a sampling here and there. A glance at the school menu shows that two to four times a week the phrase “Foods Grown Sustainably by Farmers we KNOW!” appears as a special footnote next to certain items.

Such consistency is critical if kids are to become comfortable with seeing fresh items like spinach or cucumbers as “everyday food,” rather than “special occasion food,” says van Schaik.

That consistency is also important if farmers are to see schools as reliable customers for their production. Vegetable farmer Sandy Dietz, who was one of Ridgeway’s suppliers during the school year, told me recently that selling carrots and other produce to the school was a good way to try out a new marketing option, but some ordering/transportation kinks need to be worked out before it becomes a reliable moneymaker for farms like hers.

Working out the kinks could be well worth it for farmers. As we’ve reported in this blog before, farmers like Greg Reynolds found selling to a much larger suburban school district like the one in Hopkins to be financially viable right off the bat. “…Hopkins serves 10,000 meals a week. For a local farm, that’s a huge market. And that’s just one school district,” says Reynolds.

Whatever the size or location, all schools dipping their toes in the farm to school waters face similar challenges. Besides  transportation logistics, there are outdated government nutrition guidelines, pressure to spend every school minute preparing kids for standardized tests and, the 500 pound guerrilla, tight budgets, to contend with.

As Ridgeway School Director Jodi Dansingburg makes clear in a recent LSP podcast (episode 79), it’s not enough for a school to make serving local foods a part of its value system. In Ridgeway’s case, school officials and parents see farm to school as not only providing healthier nutrition for kids, but also as a way for “giving back” to the local community—in this case farmers and processors of farm products.

Such sentiments will help Ridgeway stick with farm to school, even when it becomes a bit of a hassle. After all, isn’t educating kids in general a bit of a pain?

But good intentions and a strong value system steeped in local, sustainable food can only carry a school so far in the real world. Sometimes it takes a publicly-funded push to get them over the initial humps and to spread a good idea nationally. Such a push should be a no-brainer, since feeding kids healthy food and supporting local economies is a public good that will pay dividends to us all far down the line.

The National Farm to School Act of 2010, or something like it, could be just the kind of push that helps farm to school graduate from “nice idea” to cafeteria constant.