Monthly Archives: October 2016

Des Moines Register Editorial: “Don’t expect Iowa farmers to ‘feed the world'”

Today's editorial says: "The claim that U.S. agriculture “feeds the world” is not a harmless myth. It provides a moral justification for continuing practices that have harmed Iowa’s environment and led to low prices for farmers. It also can be used as political ammunition." https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/editorials/2016/10/09/editorial-dont-expect-iowa-farmers-feed-world/91735242/?hootPostID=ae4802f80eb8b818c9e57407af733e3c This kind of discourse also hides the fact that 1 in 8 Iowans are food insecure, and 1 in 5 Iowa children does not have enough to eat. Our natural environment has taught us that diversity builds resilience. The leaders of the Sustainable Iowa Land Trust believe we can build more resilient Iowa communities through [...]

2024-03-14T12:11:04-05:00October 13th, 2016|News|0 Comments

Big Food Strikes Back – NY Times Food series

Michael Pollan, a writer and food activist wrote a great summary of the  writes a summary of how "Big Food" lobies can fight back any attempt to regulate them. "A food system organized around subsidized monocultures of corn and soy [...] guzzled tremendous amounts of fossil fuel (for everything from the chemical fertilizer and pesticide those fields depended on to the fuel needed to ship food around the world) and in the process emitted tremendous amounts of greenhouse gas — as much as a third of all emissions, by some estimates." SILT helps farmers access land to grow food sustainably [...]

2024-03-14T11:54:36-05:00October 10th, 2016|News|0 Comments

The Dizzying Grandeur of 21st Century Agriculture

This food systems series by the New York Time Magazines is worth taking a look at... "Our industrialized food system nourishes more people, at lower cost, than any comparable system in history. It also exerts a terrifyingly massive influence on our health and our environment. Photographer George Steinmetz spent nearly a year traveling the country to capture that system, in all its scope, grandeur and dizzying scale. His photographs are all the more remarkable for the fact that so few large food producers are willing to open themselves to this sort of public view." One more reason for us to [...]

2016-10-07T12:12:45-05:00October 7th, 2016|News|0 Comments

USDA’s report on U.S. Farmland Ownership, Tenure, and Transfer sheds light on major barriers to land access

USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) recently published a report analyzing the trends in U.S. farmland ownership and land tenure drawn from USDA’s 2014 Tenure, Ownership, and Transition of Agricultural Land (TOTAL) survey. Amongst other findings, the report shows that one in three acres in the U.S. is rented, and that most (80%) of the land rented is owned by landlords who are not actively involved in farming. We know 10% of the farmland will transition over the next five years. "However, the vast majority of these land transfers are projected to occur through gifts, trusts or wills – meaning that many young and [...]

2016-10-03T21:30:06-05:00October 3rd, 2016|News|0 Comments
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