T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY Iowa DNR Forester Joe Herring, right, who is based in Iowa Falls, addressed a group of about 30 people gathered for an Iowa Learning Farms field day on edge of field practices and woodlands at the Grimes Farm Conservation Center in Marshalltown on Tuesday morning.

A crowd of approximately 30 interested farmers and conservation professionals heard from and asked questions of Iowa State University PhD candidate Gabe Johnson, Iowa DNR Forester Joe Herring, USDA/NRCS District Conservationist for Marshall County Dana Holland and Brad Woodson of Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) on edge of field practices and restoring woodlands during a field day held at the Grimes Farm Conservation Center Tuesday morning.

The goals of the initiatives are to reduce soil erosion and nitrate runoff, in turn improving water quality. Johnson has focused his studies on saturated buffers — a structure and pipe system that diverts the nitrates found in many fertilizers from ending up in waterways — and bioreactors, defined as vessels or tanks in which whole cells or cell-free enzymes transform raw materials into biochemical products and/or less undesirable by-products.

Herring noted that before European settlement, there were between 6 and 8 million acres of natural forests in Iowa — about 18 percent of the landscape — and the number dropped as low as about 1.5 million acres in the 1970s. It has jumped back up slightly since then with just shy of 3 million acres. Planting more trees and forests, he added, has a demonstrable positive effect on water quality in the state, especially after the state lost around 7 million trees during the 2020 derecho.

“I think those did kind of awaken some people (to the fact that) man, our forests are threatened right now. There’s a lot of threats in the landscape, so I do think some of that kind of upticked our tree planting a little bit,” Herring said during a subsequent interview.

Holland, a West Bend native who has worked in Marshall County for decades, discussed the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP), which are administered through the federal government and used to remove environmentally sensitive and/or less suitable land from crop production in exchange for a guaranteed payment to landowners. He described Grimes Farm as a perfect place to hold the event as it contains “a potpourri of CRP” between wetlands, prairies and other features on the edge of Marshalltown.

Finally, Woodson offered a brief synopsis of PFI before a lunch of hamburgers, macaroni salad and cookies was served to everyone in attendance.

Afterward, Holland, Herring and Woodson all spoke to the T-R (Johnson had to return to Ames to teach a class), summing up their much lengthier presentations and what they hoped the audience would take away from the event. As they saw it, all of the ideas and concepts they shared were pieces in a larger puzzle.

“I guess I’d look at it as, we’re trying to create farms that are resilient and sustainable, so if you can combine habitat with good crop practices, then we can actually have something that’s gonna be working together,” Woodson said. “A lot of time we think (that) if somebody tills their ground, all of a sudden that takes out that food source, that cover. But when they have habitat and residual residue on their landscape, then it all kind of works together — water infiltration, less erosion and then you have wildlife habitat throughout the whole farm.”

With average corn prices hovering around $4 per bushel across Iowa, Woodson said it was an opportunity to take acres that might otherwise lose money, put them into CRP and guarantee a steady income.

“We’ve got a lot more program options now with the USDA. The question is will we get funding? But yeah, a lot of options, and people really come into the office and want to know about all of this stuff, how we get more conservation on the land,” Holland said.

Herring noted that the federal Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill have provided more incentives for voluntary private conservation practices than have ever been available before, and he and Woodson urged anyone interested in getting started to contact one of the organizations involved with Tuesday’s event — though they urged patience, because any project will take time.

“Wherever you start, you’re gonna probably end up somewhere else, and that’s what we do. We refer all the time to DNR, to NRCS, and we try to work up with them and their programs,” Woodson said.

Another field event related to CRP may be coming in August, according to Holland. Craig Pfantz, a State Center farmer who also serves as the mayor of that community, told the T-R he has been utilizing no-till practices for about 44 years, becoming one of the first in the area to do so. From there, he moved into cover crops, and he still attends events like Tuesday’s field days because he enjoys them and always learns something new.

“I think one of the reasons I came was we put a bioreactor in about four years ago. We put it in, and there was no guide on how to manage it, which I thought was terrible. So I’ve kind of just had to trial and error myself,” Pfantz said. “There are things you have to do, and maybe that’s why. So what I did was I caught the guy who did the talk, and I expressed to him that there has to be a follow up after the installation.”

Pfantz, who has a son of his own that just came back to farming, is hopeful the younger generation will take heed and understand the importance of conservation to improve the long-term sustainability of the land.

“The bottom line is, I do cover crops for soil and erosion control. I can’t control all the erosion on my slopes with just no-till, and we no-till everything. So the cover crops are a way of me going to the next level of soil erosion control,” he said. “What they’re pushing on cover crops is all the biological benefits. Number one, we’ve gotta keep the soil in place.”