Study: Conservation practices in 2025 scenarios: Implications for future US agricultural policy (DOI: 10.1080/00224561.2025.2527556)
EXPERT Q&A
More than two decades ago, Joan Iverson Nassauer, professor of landscape architecture at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, helped envision a new future for Corn Belt agriculture. And not just any future, but one that could be reasonably realized by 2025.
Instead of focusing solely on corn and soybean production-as farmers were incentivized by federal policy to do-Nassauer and colleagues analyzed practices to improve biodiversity, reduce downstream flooding and prevent pollution from runoff. This would improve not only the ecological health of the Corn Belt, but could also help better protect the people living there and around the country.
Cancer has been linked to pollution from industrialized agriculture and Iowa, which leads the nation in corn production, also has the country's second highest cancer rates. Youth cancer rates in Iowa and the Corn Belt are also increasing faster than elsewhere in the United States, according to a recent report from The Washington Post.
Nassauer and colleagues published their vision for 2025 in 2002. They now have a new study comparing their alternatives with what has actually happened to Iowa agriculture and rural communities.
What makes this new study and its predecessor from 2002 so important?
Agricultural practices in America's rural areas have a big impact on the quality of drinking water everywhere. The key thing is that, almost all over this country, not just in the Corn Belt, rural watersheds supply the water for cities, towns and private wells. I think it's sometimes difficult for urban residents to even conceive of how rural landscapes actually provide you with the water you drink. It's difficult to understand that common practices that improve productivity or reduce labor for farmers have compromised the water quality and the health of people who are drinking from those watersheds. The Iowa Environmental Council issued a report earlier this year that cites research related to Iowa water quality and Iowa cancer rates. That's a huge, huge problem.
What do your studies tell us about the impact of federal farming policy?
The message from all of us who were involved in the alternative scenario project and who've been watching the evolution of federal agricultural policy over the last 30 years is we know how to do better. There is no lack of knowledge.
Rural landscapes change in response to federal policy, and we are certainly not the only voices pointing this out. What I think a lot of people don't understand is that the federal government spends tens of billions of dollars each year to keep agriculture going the way it has been. Crop insurance is a very significant financial lever that farmers respond to, and the crops that can be insured are a limited menu that includes corn, soybeans and wheat on farmland that has been designated for crop production. Federal incentives for conservation practices are dwarfed by incentives and disaster relief for production of conventional crops.
We need federal policies that, rather than incentivizing farmers to crop everywhere they can, instead give farmers at least equal incentives to more precisely identify areas that are less productive and return those to uses that can protect water quality and enhance biodiversity. That kind of precision in identifying which soils have greater environmental benefits if they are not used for conventional crops was the foundation for the alternative scenarios we developed 25 years ago.
In my research, I've spoken with a lot of farmers, and I'll always remember one who I interviewed many years ago. I was asking him about his choices, and why he did what he did. He said to me, "Well, I don't really farm crops, I farm the programs." This would have been about 40 years ago and it's still true today.
What are the approaches you've studied as alternatives to maximizing land dedicated to corn and other commodity crops?
In our 2002 paper, we contrasted three 2025 scenarios with business as usual, which was the 1994 landscape. All of the 2025 scenarios needed to embrace the idea that Iowa has great agricultural land and they also had to be plausible. We could easily identify, even back then, the technology and the policy levers that would get us to these scenarios. So this was not pie-in-the-sky at all.
We developed one future scenario that maximized commodity crops: corn and soybeans. Even 30 years ago when we were developing these scenarios, these were very much the main crops of Iowa and the Corn Belt in general. But, importantly, our future scenario assumed that all the existing best management practices that farmers could adopt were adopted everywhere, which was not the case in 1994, and is not the case in 2025. We called this the production scenario.
The second scenario took on the idea that in order to improve water quality, we needed a lot more continuous cover instead of cultivated crops, especially on more erodible land. We thought this continuous cover might be pasture or hay for livestock in more integrated farming systems. These systems also included corn and soybeans any place where the land was less erodible.
In the third scenario, we emphasized biodiversity by having land selectively taken out of production along streams and where it was highly erodible. We also invented a novel farming practice to put prairie strips in among strips of a corn-bean rotation. Prairie was the native cover for almost all of Iowa, but has almost been entirely eliminated by industrial agriculture. My colleague, Rick Cruse, a professor of agronomy at Iowa State University, had already field tested a similar practice that introduced strips of continuous cover in a corn-bean rotation, and we built on that innovation to show how prairie could be part of a production practice. More recently, an Iowa State team has built on our innovation, monitoring test plots and engaging farmers all over Iowa in field testing prairie strips as part of production agriculture.
What did you learn in the 2002 study?
We developed these three scenarios and applied them with a very clear set of rules to two different Iowa watersheds: a flat, ideal corn-bean watershed in Story County, and a more rolling watershed that's more erodible, but was still being used for corn and bean production in Poweshiek County.
Then our team assessed the outcomes by 10 metrics. To demonstrate that we do know how to do better with agricultural land, both the water quality scenario and the biodiversity scenario performed way, way, way better than the crop production scenario and present practices on water quality and biodiversity metrics. And both were far and away more preferred by farmers when they were asked what is best for the future of the people of Iowa. Five metrics were related to biodiversity, three were related to water quality, one metric was related to financial return to land based on market prices, and one was related to what farmers thought was best for the future of Iowa.
All three future scenarios performed better than present practices on every metric, except for one. On financial return to land, the water quality scenario had lower market price returns than the present landscape or either the production or biodiversity future scenarios. We described these assessments in detail in our 2004 paper, "Assessing alternative futures for agriculture in Iowa, USA," and 2007 book, "From the Corn Belt to the Gulf."
To emphasize that it is entirely possible for agriculture to do better, the outcome of our 2002 study, and an impetus for writing this paper 25 years later, is that the crop production scenario actually produced much better water quality than the 1994 business-as-usual landscape. Our crop production scenario performs better because, and this is a really important part of it, we made the generous assumption that farmers in the crop production scenario would use all available best management practices to reduce soil erosion and improve downstream water quality in cropped fields. These were already practices that they could get paid for or receive financial assistance to implement by the federal government. The problem with these best management practices is that they're purely voluntary and many farmers, for many reasons-including eligibility for crop insurance on base acres-don't choose to use all relevant best management practices.
But I don't want to fault farmers. I want us all to look at the effects of our federal policy choices. This is a matter for all of us who pay federal taxes. We have an effect on what the farmers in the watersheds that we drink from can choose to do as part of their making a living in agriculture.
What is your outlook for these issues against the current social, economic and political backdrop?
There is a lot of uncertainty for farmers related to trade and the tariffs. You see that in soybean and corn markets. At the same time, I believe it was the The Wall Street Journal that reported that there is discussion of an additional $10 billion dollars of federal aid coming to soybean farmers to ameliorate the effects of these market vacillations.
So, to me, that sounds like more of the same. If you've already got soybeans planted, market prices are really low at the moment, but never fear-the federal government is likely to provide a financial buffer.
Something to understand about why Corn Belt agriculture is the way it is, and this applies to the Wheat Belt as well: These are states with relatively low populations, with more and more area occupied by very large farms, and where small towns have become depopulated. But those states all have two senators. That doesn't change even though rural America has changed. The influence of large farmers and industrial agriculture lobbying groups only gets greater as small towns deteriorate. I don't see any immediate change to that trend on the horizon.
But, as I said, I, my co-authors on this paper and others who are involved in the work absolutely know we can do better. Sadly, as water quality in cities is threatened and as cancer rates soar in Iowa, at some point I think the effects on human health most likely will galvanize people to say, "Enough."
In the meantime, though, those scenarios developed almost 30 years ago, along with all that has been learned since, can be elements for blueprints for doing better. That's what makes me energized to continue to talk about this. We can pick and choose from those elements and do so much better for biodiversity across the country, for our drinking water and for the health of people.
