Editorial: Restore a bit of Iowa's prairie, reap benefits

Iowa and its economy are, quite literally, eroding.

The state’s rich topsoil, which is the key to making this some of the best and most productive farmland in the world, is disappearing. It was once about 14 inches deep — more, in some areas of the state. Today, it’s about six inches deep on average, and it continues to decline.

Even now, Iowa’s loss of topsoil results in a staggering $1 billion in annual economic losses, and that is generally considered a very conservative estimate.

For legislators and policymakers who are reluctant to impose mandatory conservation practices in Iowa, that fact alone should be cause for alarm. If they don’t care about the loss of wildlife habitat in Iowa, don’t care about the farm runoff that is polluting Iowa streams, don’t care about the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and don’t care about the growing financial liability associated with all of these problems, they should, at least, care about the billions of dollars Iowa is losing as its top soil is depleted.

The state and federal government are working toward solutions, and have funded and developed some innovative programs, but they’re moving — as government often does — in slow motion, ignoring the fact that this is, even now, an economic crisis. Iowa desperately needs a well-funded, multi-pronged, comprehensive strategy that restores and protects the state’s waterways and its soil, and it needed it yesterday.

More than half of Iowa’s topsoil is already gone and what remains is disappearing at an annual rate of five tons per acre. In years of heavy rains, the losses in some areas of the state can exceed 100 tons per acre. Combine those losses with the fact that some of the conservation practices that can turn this trend around take several years to bear fruit, and you begin to understand why this is an issue of such urgency.

One element of a broader, comprehensive strategy should be the innovative Iowa State University initiative called STRIPS, which stands for Science-based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairie Strips. The program promotes planting strips of native prairie on active farmland.

Iowa once had 28 million acres of native tall-grass prairie, Today, it has about 60,000 acres of native prairie, which is two-tenths of 1 percent of what we once had. The state’s first farmers plowed up the prairie to produce crops that generated cash. But now it’s understood that the loss of the prairie poses a threat to Iowa’s ability to continue producing those same crops.

ISU’s research shows that by converting just 10 percent of a crop field to diverse, native perennials, farmers can reduce the amount of soil depletion in their fields by 90 percent, and the cut the amount of nitrogen washed from their fields through surface runoff by up to 85 percent. At the same time, these prairie strips create a valuable habitat for wildlife, including pollinators and other insects beneficial to farmers.

Unfortunately, STRIPS isn’t funded at a level allows for aggressive expansion of the program. In 2015, it received a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but the total amount was just $500,000, and that was for a single, three-year initiative.

Even now, 13 years after STRIPS was launched as a single-site research project, its reach is relatively small — not so much because farmers don’t embrace the concept, but because governmental support is lacking.

As the Washington Post reported this month, 120 farmers who attended presentations on strip prairies last year indicated their support for the concept and said they intended to plant, collectively, 400 acres of prairie. That was too many acres for the STRIPS program, which depends heavily on federal grant money, to handle.

Yet the time has never been better for programs like this. Due to lower commodity prices, Iowa farmers are looking for opportunities to use their land in new ways that help them and their neighbors. Over the past four years, they have enrolled more than 127,000 acres in a federal conservation reserve program designed to sustain butterflies, bees, wasps, birds and bats. Most of that gain has been in just the past year, and Iowa is now home to an estimated 40 percent of America's total pollinator habitat enrolled in the program, according to the Iowa Farm Service Agency.

The STRIPS program isn’t the solution to all of Iowa’s conservation issues, but it does show great promise and it should be component of both state-funded and federally funded programs geared toward protecting and preserving Iowa’s greatest natural and economic resources.

Plant your own prairie

For more information on how prairie strips work, visit https://www.nrem.iastate.edu/research/STRIPs/ or download "The Landowner's Guide to Prairie Conservation Strips" at: https://www.extension.iastate.edu/alternativeag/info/Landowners%20Guide%20to%20Prairie%20Conservation%20Strips.pdf

 Information on prairie strips will be presented Aug. 23 at the Neeley-Kinyon Memorial Farm Field Day in Greenfield, and Sept. 8 at the Eastern Iowa Airport Field Day in Cedar Rapids.