By DOUG SCHMITZ
Iowa Correspondent DES MOINES, Iowa — Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI), whose on-farm research has been crucial to the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture’s work, hosted a Jan. 12 reception during its annual conference in Des Moines.
Gary Huber, PFI food systems coordinator, said the Iowa State University center has “been a blessing for PFI, for sustainable agriculture and for Iowa.”
At the reception, Dennis Keeney, who served as the center’s director from 1988-99, said it “put my concepts of science and agriculture to work. It turned out these were parallel to the goals of PFI in many ways.”
Fred Kirschenmann, who led the center for the next five years and is now the Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow, said if PFI didn’t exist, “we’d have to invent them.
“I knew when I joined the Leopold Center as a farmer that research doesn’t stand the test of time unless it’s been tested on the farm,” he said.
Center Director Jerry DeWitt said PFI has added value and richness to its work. “We’ve been with you in the past, we’re with you today and we’ll be with you tomorrow,” he said.
He said the desire at Leopold Center is to create more visibility and focus attention on challenges and opportunities faced on a daily basis – even after 20 years. “We believe that our role is to bring forth these issues, debate workable alternatives, find common ground and provide reasonable approaches for practices and strategies that offer hope and the prospect of success for Iowans,” he said.
DeWitt added the center has built a national reputation for its work on riparian buffers, hoop barns, rotational and winter grazing and research that led to development of the late-spring soil test and equipment to more accurately apply nitrogen fertilizer.
“The Center also is a national leader in food systems research, aimed at providing new options and markets for Iowa farmers,” he said. “In fact, the Leopold Center’s ‘food miles’ research, done in 2004, is one of the most-downloaded reports on our website.”
The center was named after Burlington, Iowa, native Aldo Leopold, often considered the father of wildlife management and of the United States’ wilderness system. During his 61 years, Leopold published nearly 500 works, including technical reports, speeches, textbooks, newsletters, reviews and even a few poems.
But he’s best-known for writing A Sand County Almanac, a collection of 41 essays published 18 months after his death in 1948.
An early graduate from Yale University’s School of Forestry, Leopold worked many years for the then-newly-formed U.S. Forest Service in the Arizona and New Mexico territories, was a game consultant and also chaired the country’s first Department of Game Management at the University of Wisconsin.
This farm news was published in the Aug. 29, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee. |
