Connie Mutel outlined what impact agriculture has had on Iowa’s land, including in the past, present and future.
Mutel was the author and editor of the book “Tending Iowa’s Land: Our Environmental Past, Present and Future.” She worked with 27 different authors on the book, which highlights the changes seen in Iowa over the past 200 years, as well as ideas on how to restore and correct some of the damage happening.
Mutel said that one of the ways we as Iowans are experiencing the changes to Iowa is in the severity of storms we witness. In 2023, there were 22 severe storms that struck the area, and 63 globally. Those severe storms are tracking upwards, spurred on by factors like increased greenhouse gases.
Mutel said that in the early 1800s as settlers first arrived in Iowa, the state was primarily prairies or woodlands, with a huge biodiversity of animals and entities in the soil that produced very fertile farming ground.
Roughly 80 percent of Iowa was prairie at that time, and those prairies consisted of wetlands and traditional prairie.
It also accounted for a wide variety of biodiversity and interconnected species, both above and below the soil, that were dependent on one another.
One of the benefits of such rich prairie was that it would take so much of the carbon dioxide out of the air and sequester it underground, in turn helping to create the carbon that was the soil Iowa was known for. And with so many plants, Iowa had a huge population of other animals, like birds that made these prairie ecosystems their home.
“The root systems for many of these prairie plants stretched 10 to 20 feet underground, which helped curb the erosion of soils,” Mutel said. “It also helped stop things like flooding, as the soil filtered that water and held it in place.”
As settlers moved in, they started changing Iowa’s ecosystems. They tilled and cultivated many acres of Iowa’s prairies to plant crops they knew from other locations or had in other countries to plant here.
Mutel said that goal was to transition much of the prairie into farmland.
By doing that, many of the species and microorganisms that made the rich Iowa soil home were killed or depleted. Plowing, by oxidizing the soil, killed many of the microorganisms, and since they were moving from a perennial plant to an annual plant, that organic matter was lost. Without as many rich root systems, soil would also begin to erode more often, and flooding became more prevalent as the water didn’t infiltrate into the soil, but now rushed across the compacted ground.
As more and more prairie was lost, more and more carbon was also released into the atmosphere.
In the 1900s to 1950s, farming transitioned from being worked by animals to fossil fueled powered equipment, again greatly increasing the amount of carbon dioxide used in farming.
From the 1950s onward and the intensification of industrialization in farming practices, farms have gotten much larger. Because they focus on annual crops, much of the soil loses nutrients, and fertilizers and herbicides are applied to the ground to help the particular crops grow, but those products also kill microbiomes and other items in the soil. More soil is lost to erosion without the roots holding it in place, and as it is lost, it takes nitrogen heavy nutrients into the waterways.
That’s lead to where we are today. Nitrogen is contributing to issues in the Gulf of Mexico.
With more carbon gases in the atmosphere warming things up and becoming turbulent, it leads to more severe weather events.
“It gets harder to do things like plan a vacation, because you don’t know what to expect from the weather with these more severe storms globally,” Mutel said.
And because many of the practices on Iowa’s farms migrated to other states and their industrialized farming operations, Iowa’s problem is now becoming the problem of other states as well.
Mutel said that there are steps people can take to help correct some of these issues. The first is educating and advocating for better farm practices.
“We need to encourage more ways to introduce nature into agricultural practices for the benefit of both,” Mutel said.
She said one of the important parts of the authors she was working with in the book was including spots of real world examples and hopeful solutions to the problems.
People need to affirm their vision for farming in the future and keep solutions in mind.
“Without a vision of what we can do to correct things, we’re like people walking to a curve in the horizon,” Mutel said. “We’re never going to reach the destination because we don’t even know what direction we’re ultimately heading in.”
Items like the 30 percent of natural ground by 2030 are something that can be considered.
“Iowa is already in that roughly 20 percent of land is back to natural habitat,” Mutel said. “It’s focusing on getting that last 20 percent turned back over to natural ground. That could be the ground that’s too wet or has never produced great crops for farmers to be shifted back to natural ground instead to help get back to natural land.”