2

A Place in the Country

Improving the View in the Midst of an Industrial Landscape

Jan Libbey and Tim Landgraf hiked through waist-high prairie to the top of a dramatic knob on their farm in north-central Iowa. As they stood among big bluestem, Indian grass, and switchgrass, corn and soybean fields flowed in every direction, the monocultural landscape broken up only by a string of wind generators to the east and a complex of confinement hog barns to the northwest. The hill Libbey and Landgraf stood on, this particular September afternoon, rose above a shorter bump in the land. The two hills, which at a distance resembled an immense sow and a piglet sleeping under a blanket, together formed a smooth, elongated ridge that ran for a few hundred yards back toward the house and outbuildings that made up the core of the farm. Geologists call such knobs in this part of the country moraines, and they are dramatic symbols of the historical glacial movements that played such a foundational role in this land’s present. Just as geological activity made Texas the oligarch of oil, it played a key role in making Iowa the monarch of maize.

These ridges run roughly north-south, following the pattern of other geological formations that make up the Des Moines Lobe, a tongue of immensely rich soil that was left behind when the Wisconsin glaciation pulled back its icy blanket some twelve thousand to thirteen thousand years ago. The melting glacier left behind a poorly drained landscape of pebbly deposits, as well as clay and peat from glacial lakes. It made for some of the best, flattest farmland in the world, but here and there left what’s been called a “knob and kettle” topography—small lakes, potholes, and, occasionally, bumps on the land.¹ Thanks to one of those larger bumps, the state capitol building in Des Moines sits on high ground in the south-central part of the state.

A geological anomaly like a moraine on an otherwise flat landscape catches the eye. Devils Tower might not be so impressive if it was plunked down in the middle of the Rockies, but a rise of land a few hundred feet high in the middle of Iowa can be jarring. If you’re a corn farmer whose goal is to drag a forty-eight-row planter across a tabletop landscape at ten miles per hour, that change in elevation is to be avoided. But if you’re someone who’s looking for a nice view out in the country, it’s quite welcome indeed. In a part of north-central Iowa famous for its flatness, the couple had somehow found elevation.

“These hills are part of the reason we moved here. We weren’t going to farm—we just wanted a big acreage,” said Landgraf, adding that the previous owners “were just tickled pink to sell it to us, because we took all the rough ground.”

When the couple bought this land in the heart of Iowa’s row crop country in 1989, they viewed it through the “lens of the traditional environmentalist,” recalled Libbey. But a lot had changed in the past quarter-century. That fifty-five acres of land they originally bought has expanded to 132, and it is now the source of their livelihood, not just a respite from the industrialized world. In 1996 Libbey and Landgraf launched One Step at a Time Gardens, a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) produce operation. They started out with six members and over the years steadily grew it to the point where in 2002 Tim could quit his town job as an engineer. When I first visited the farm in 2009, Libbey and Landgraf had 150 farm shareholders in nearby towns as well as Des Moines, one hundred miles to the south, and were producing vegetables on eight acres of gardens. By the end of 2016, the couple had downsized considerably—they had pared their vegetable acres down to four and had fifty shareholders—deliveries were no longer being made to Des Moines. Besides the CSA market, they were selling wholesale in the region, as well as marketing pasture-raised meat chickens direct to consumers. A portion of their wholesale business included membership in North Iowa Fresh, a start-up food hub that sold to grocers and restaurants in northern Iowa.

Despite these changes, Landgraf and Libbey have remained committed to retaining the land’s natural habitat. It’s a balancing act, one they think is made easier thanks to the model they use to market their food. They got into farming to have a more legitimate voice in the debate over the future of rural communities in the area. Now the question is how can such a wildly successful farm introduce the rest of the community to a different idea of treating the land?

Fighting for the Land

Jan Libbey grew up in Des Moines and has a fisheries and wildlife degree from Iowa State University, where she met Tim, who has a degree in metallurgical engineering and was raised on a diversified farm. They both have a love of the outdoors. While working as a county naturalist in north-central Iowa for five years, Jan was able to put into practice her passion for connecting people to the land utilizing environmental education. So it seemed like a natural step for the couple to move out of town and get onto some land. What particularly attracted them to the hilly parcel they ended up on was that it was right across the road from the 490-acre East Twin Lake Wildlife Management Area, a public gem consisting of a glacial lake, wetlands, and forested land. They rented out the farm’s crop acres and began raising a family—they have two grown children, Jess and Andrew—while Landgraf continued his career as an engineer.

But soon after moving to the farm, a neighbor proposed building a large industrialized hog operation in the neighborhood. This dragged Libbey and Landgraf into the heart of the factory farm hog wars that had begun in the Midwest a few years before. As reports of water and air pollution caused by liquid manure contamination from large concentrated animal feeding operations—also known as CAFOs—proliferated, it was beginning to look like a healthy environment and “modern” farming were not compatible. This created significant tensions in rural communities.²

“During my early work in environmental education, it was more common to talk about agriculture in terms of its environmental detriments. It put farmers and environmentalists at loggerheads,” said Libbey, bumping her fists together to illustrate her point.

The battle they and their neighbors waged went all the way to the Iowa Supreme Court, which ruled that local governments such as counties could not control the siting of factory livestock operations. The result of that decision is evident when one visits One Step at a Time Gardens on a summer day—at times the pungent odor of the hog CAFO a half-mile away wafts over the farmstead. After the court decision, Libbey and Landgraf sought out a different avenue for dealing with the situation: they more than doubled the acres they owned to prevent future CAFOs from moving closer.

“We found out we weren’t warriors,” said Libbey of their foray into the factory farm wars. “The lobbying work we got involved with seemed to be more about putting up stop signs and less about offering new directions. As landowners, we began to see the need to open dialogue, not shut it down.”

They discovered that in their immediate community, there simply was no farming model that offered a viable alternative to large-scale industrialized agriculture. And Libbey was aware of research that came out in the early 1990s showing that even when environmental educators get people out on the land for hikes and other activities, it doesn’t necessarily change behavior. Maybe Libbey and Landgraf weren’t frontline eco-warriors, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t participate in the battle in other ways. So they started looking at how they could model a more sustainable kind of agriculture in their community. As part of their research, one year the couple traveled to southwestern Wisconsin and attended the Organic Farming Conference that’s sponsored annually by the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Agriculture Education Service (MOSES). There they met farmers who were proving food production and environmental health weren’t mutually exclusive.

The Community Supported Agriculture model appealed to them, partly because they already knew how to raise a big garden. But the way CSA farming connects producers and consumers was also attractive to the couple. It consists of people buying a share in a farm before the growing season. In return, the operation provides regular deliveries of sustainably grown food. Most CSA farms provide produce, but an increasing number are also offering members other products from the land, such as meat, cheese, eggs, and even cut flowers. CSA farming is considered by conscientious eaters to be one of the ultimate methods for knowing intimately the source of one’s food and thus having a say in how and by whom it’s produced.

“I think it was the depth of the model that appealed to me,” Libbey told me. “It provides for an extension of that naturalist education.”

Alleys and Ecosystems

Over time, the environmentalist and farmer worlds have melded on the farm, something that is possible when you’re producing food in a manner that does not rely on thousands of acres of monocrops. Libbey’s goal is to make the farm into one that reconnects food systems and ecosystems on a daily basis. For example, she and Landgraf showed me a part of their gardens that is planted between two sets of shelterbelts—a part of the farm they call the “Alley.” It builds on some soil conservation tree plantings of poplar and honeysuckle that were already part of the farm back in 1989. The farmers have since added oak, walnut, and ninebark shrubs to the shelterbelt. Besides the soil conservation benefits, the thicker plantings provide a microclimate that alleviates the kind of weather extremes that can make vegetable farming tricky in the Upper Midwest.

At one end of the gardens were the farm’s main source of fertility: pastured chickens. They are part of an intricate rotation system where the farmers take two of the fields out of production every year and seed down red clover. They then run the chickens over the red clover, moving the pens daily. The next year the chickened land, rich in fertility and tilth, goes back into food production. The chickens aren’t just a source of fertility—the family sold around nine hundred a year at the peak of their production.

After checking on the chickens, Libbey and Landgraf left the shelter of the alley gardens and visited more gardens that are planted on the exposed ridge of the lower part of the moraine. The lack of tree cover was noticeable, as stiff winds swept the ridge. The farmers had also planted oak, American cranberry, and spruce along the sides of the ridge-top gardens, a future source of protection from the wind.

“We wished we had planted these earlier,” Libbey lamented. But then, they didn’t know when they first moved here they were going to have six acres of garden to protect. North of the ridge-top gardens was a fourteen-acre wetland restoration that was established in 2001. Native grasses were planted in the upland of the restoration, and cattails poked up in the open water. On the other side of the ridge was a fifteen-acre wetland that was established in 2008. After checking out the wetlands, Landgraf and Libbey waded through the eight acres of prairie that was restored on the ridge soon after they moved to the farm.

All of this has made for a farm that has a nice mix of cultivated and wild land—the prairies, tree plantings, and wetlands seem to wrap around the gardens and the row crop acres they rent out to a neighbor. Spend any time here and it will become clear that although they are now making a living on this land, these natural pockets are still key to Libbey and Landgraf’s quality of life.

“It’s a lot of hard work,” said Libbey of producing food on a weekly basis for CSA shareholders. “So, within this hard work you always need this respite that’s kind of close to our core in the first place. This is what drew us here.”

Posted on the wall of a garage that’s been converted into a vegetable packing shed was a listing of forty bird species they’ve spotted on the farm. Geese, ducks, herons, and swans, as well as deer in the wintertime, utilize the restored wetlands. Landgraf described a recent day in the fields that was a wealth of wildness: “So first thing there was a big flock of probably thirty or forty pelicans. When they’re flying that’s when we’ll see them—this big salt and pepper circling. And then we had fifty or sixty Canada geese.” The farmers also talk with delight (and a little pride) about the migrating monarch butterflies that congregate by the hundreds in the alley garden area and the upland chorus of frogs that hang around the places where the chickens graze.

A Public Good

But unlike the East Twin Lake Wildlife Management Area across the road, One Step at a Time is not devoted exclusively to serving as a nature preserve—it must pay its own way. In the early years of their land tenure, Landgraf and Libbey’s management decisions were driven primarily by aesthetics; these days taking acres out of production for prairie or wetlands is something the farmers think twice about.

“I think the key is trying to have that planting diversity and trying to figure out how you can intersperse what you want to produce with wild areas,” said Landgraf. “Because at the end of the day we have to produce product to make some money so we can stay here. You know, we’re not just doing this for kicks.”

Government programs have helped. For example, the wetlands and their adjoining uplands are a result of the Wetlands Reserve Program, a United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) program that provides cost-share money for establishment of wetlands, as well as a regular per-acre payment that is comparable to what Libbey and Landgraf would receive if they were renting the land out to a crop farmer. Some of their natural areas are set aside in the Conservation Reserve Program, which also provides annual “rental” payments.

The NRCS also provided cost-share funds to help pay for the trees. In addition, the Hancock County Conservation Board has provided a tree planter, seed drill, and prairie burning assistance to help establish and maintain the farm’s habitat restorations. The farmers have also taken advantage of state and federal assistance to move their operation in another sustainable direction: energy independence. The couple has erected an impressive array of solar panels on a hillside near their specially designed energy-efficient house, which was built after the original one burned down. The analytical engineer in Landgraf emerged as he excitedly described the analysis that went into choosing solar over wind energy. It turns out their peak demand is in the spring and summer, when the walk-in cooler is working overtime to keep produce fresh, and they are burning a lot of electricity to freeze broilers. Solar panels churn out the most electricity right at that time of the year. Wind turbines, on the other hand, are higher maintenance and at a low ebb power-producing-wise during the summer in that part of Iowa. On one visit to the farm, I walked over to examine the solar array, which was soaking up a summer day; at times the panels produce more electricity than the farm can utilize. A few miles away a collection of giant white wind turbines stood baking in the sun among thousands of acres of corn and soybeans, their rotors as still as statues.

The practical decision-making that went into going solar is typical for the way Libbey and Landgraf approach management of their farm. The environmentalists in them are interested in adopting sustainable energy alternatives and establishing wildlife habitat; the practical farmer side requires some numbers to be crunched first. Just because it’s better for the environment doesn’t mean a new addition will automatically get the nod. Environmental sustainability and economic sustainability must go hand-in-hand.

That said, the farmers are the first to admit that even when they’ve used government conservation programs on the farm, it’s not always as well planned out as it might appear. For example, the two wetlands they’ve established were mostly out of desperation—the farmer they are renting some of their land to was tired of getting stuck in former prairie potholes.

“We finally said forget it—it wants to be a wetland,” Libbey said.

In some ways, Landgraf and Libbey are using government conservation programs to buy time for their land and figure out its long-term future. For example, the fifteen-year Wetlands Reserve Program contracts help alleviate the financial risk of keeping that land in natural habitat for the time being. But the clock is ticking, and it’s not clear whether such contracts will be available for renewal in the future.

“The payment is pretty comparable to what you’re getting for cash rent, so economically that solves that issue for fifteen years,” said Landgraf. “But then at the end of the fifteen years you’ve got to say okay, now what? Because we can’t afford to keep it permanently out. We’re going to have to do something.”

Maybe by the time the contract runs out, they will have figured out how to make the ecological services provided by such habitat—cleaner water, a home for wildlife, and so on—pay off, either through the marketplace or via an acknowledgement that natural farm habitat is a public good society feels is worth supporting. For example, while attending the MOSES Organic Conference several years ago, they ran into Eric Mader, who worked for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Entomologists, farmers, and beekeepers are becoming increasingly alarmed at the decline in domesticated pollinators such as honeybees, as well as their wild cousins such as bumblebees.³ This is one of those ecological crises that affects humans directly—every third bite of food is directly or indirectly the result of the work of pollinators. Produce farms especially are heavily reliant on pollination services.⁴

Beekeepers are reporting cases where so-called colony collapse disorder is wiping out entire hives with no warning.⁵ In early 2017, the rusty-patched bumblebee had the dubious distinction of becoming the first bee in the continental U.S. to be put on the Endangered Species list. It’s estimated that this species alone has declined in nearly 90 percent of its range over the past two decades.⁶ The problems faced by pollinating insects have been attributed to, among other things, pesticide poisoning, imported diseases, climate change, and lack of foraging resources caused by the plowing up and paving over of the landscape. University of Minnesota bee expert Marla Spivak told me there’s likely no single cause—it’s probably a combination of factors. The issue that overshadows every other threat to wild and domesticated pollinators is lack of natural habitat to forage on and live in. Diverse landscapes can go a long way toward making beneficial insects more resilient in the face of disease, toxic chemicals, and general stress, say entomologists and ecologists. And this is where diverse, sustainable farms can play a role.

Research shows that farms with woods, meadows, and other natural areas growing flowering plants have a larger number of insect pollinators. But monocultures of corn are deserts to such insects.⁷ Beekeepers often get panicked calls from fruit and vegetable producers who are trying to raise melons and other pollinator-dependent crops in the midst of corn country. In addition, heavy tillage disrupts wild bee habitat—two-thirds of native bees nest underground. And according to research conducted by entomologists at Pennsylvania State University and North Carolina State University, plants grown in healthier soil—in this case soil treated with earthworm compost to increase biological activity—are much more attractive and nutritious for pollinators when compared to their chemically treated counterparts.⁸ That’s one more reason we should be excited about efforts to improve soil health on farms (see chapters 5 and 6).

At the Organic Conference, Mader talked to Libbey and Landgraf about the role diverse operations like theirs could play in providing habitat for wild pollinators such as bumblebees. The conversation struck a chord with the farmers, who rely heavily on pollinators for their gardens. At the time, they had recently lost access to some honeybee hives, and were wondering where they would get a consistent source of pollination services. Mader made it clear that all of the native prairie plants they have interspersed around their gardens provide prime habitat for pollinators. Indeed, research done by Iowa State University showed One Step at a Time is home to a good diversity of pollinators, particularly various species of squash bees. And those pollinators can benefit not just their farm, but agricultural and natural plantings in general—providing an ecological service to the community at large.

When I returned to the farm seven years after my first visit, Libbey and Landgraf had just got done enrolling four acres into a USDA program that provides landowners funds to establish and maintain pollinator habitat. The plan was to plant eight different grasses and thirty-three different forbs.

“You know, maybe the benefit I get from that piece of ground is that it is an incubator for pollinators that make food production possible in my gardens,” said Landgraf. “What other benefits are we getting in terms of pollinators, in terms of beneficial insects, reduced insect pressure, that we really don’t know about? Perhaps it’s enough to get you rethinking how you view a piece of ground that you think you need to be farming.”

The four acres of pollinator habitat is being borrowed from a fifty-five-acre parcel Libbey and Landgraf are cash renting to a local crop farmer. Odd corners that were hard to farm anyway are being turned over to the perennial plantings.

Libbey, for her part, loves how issues like the need for pollinator habitat can bridge the divide between the environmentalist and farmer worlds that exist within the community, as well as within herself. “Gosh, that environmentalist bent is integrating itself into the ag bent,” she said.

Takes a Community

The hundreds of thousands of acres of monocropped fields that flow in every direction from One Step at a Time are a constant reminder that no matter what innovative changes the farmers make on their own land, a whole lot of status quo is out there. Libbey and Landgraf feel members of the community at large—farmers and nonfarmers alike—must show they are willing to support farms as natural habitats if operations like theirs are to be more than the exception. One way the general public can do that is to consume food produced on sustainable farms that are benefiting the local environment.

Libbey worked for a couple of years on a project in Wright County to get local food to low-income people. She helped build up the North Iowa Farmers’ Market in Mason City, and assisted in coordinating a Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture–funded project that focused on local food as economic development.

“If we can take that regional approach, then we can start putting in place some initiatives that begin to trickle down and have a more local impact,” said Libbey. “Because the farm and food connections are still happening on a very local basis.”

“Hopefully our farm members are making the connection that agriculture is not just something that’s done out there,” added Landgraf, gesturing to the surrounding countryside.

He and Libbey make that connection through the food, of course, but also via a weekly newsletter that comes with the shares during the growing season. Besides recipes, a listing of what’s in the share, and an update on the farm, the Weekly Note also includes ways—book suggestions, meeting notices, brief notes—of connecting people to the larger issues affecting agriculture, the land and communities.

But there’s still some work to do before One Step at a Time becomes a “social change agent,” as Libbey puts it. She said members tell them the main reasons they belong to the farm are that it’s a source of healthy food and they like the idea of supporting a local farm. They also say they belong for what they term “environmental reasons.” But when Libbey presses them further on that particular point, it becomes clear these members are mostly concerned about specific practices that keep chemicals out of their food, rather than the “big picture sustainability” of family farms and rural landscapes.

Changing minds in the agricultural community may be even tougher. The couple is active with Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI), which, among other things, conducts on-farm research and field days related to sustainable agriculture. Landgraf sees even conventional farmers showing an interest in trying sustainable production systems as they grapple with problems like soil erosion and pest outbreaks. He’s also excited that the environmental community is starting to see that food production and ecological health can go hand-in-hand. Groups such as the Xerces Society and the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation have co-sponsored PFI fields days at One Step at a Time. Landgraf pointed out that such field days cover more than what is growing on the tillable acres.

“At most PFI field days you focus on what’s in the fields,” he told me. “At ours we focus mostly on what is around the fields.”

The Glacial Grind

On a recent visit to the farm, I got a sense of what Landgraf was talking about. Around thirty of us had gathered at One Step at a Time Gardens on a sunny Sunday in mid-August for a PFI field day. The focus was on the farm’s work with pollinators, as well as its research related to nineteen heritage tomato varieties and how to do enterprise analysis for a working farm.

After introductions beneath a giant maple tree in front of Jan and Tim’s house, we walked across the farmyard to two low-tech greenhouses called high tunnels. With their plastic sheeting stretched over hooped metal tubing, high tunnels resemble miniature Quonset huts, and in recent years they’ve become a popular way for midwestern vegetable producers to extend the growing season—they trap a surprisingly large amount of the sun’s rays late into the fall and early in the spring. A few yards from the tunnels were two abandoned bear-cage corn cribs and a steel-sided grain bin. One high tunnel was fairly packed with tomatoes; clusters of fat fruit were strung up to make efficient use of the space. The other high tunnel was growing fall greens like lettuce and kale, as well as peppers. Harvested onions had been hung up to dry along the sides of one high tunnel.

The rich black soil in the vegetable plots downhill from the high tunnels was covered with a variety of vegetables, as well as a sign of one disadvantage of farming within a rifle shot of a wildlife management area. Despite the presence of a tall electric fencing system, the dainty hoofprints of deer were everywhere. “It’s really a deterrent—it’s not 100 percent,” Landgraf said of the fencing, adding that deer have even jumped through the side panels of the high tunnels to feed on plants.

While standing in the vegetable plots, Libbey described the importance of developing good financial enterprise analyses for small farms like theirs. She held up two resources they rely on—Fearless Farm Finances and the Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook—and described how One Step at a Time used enterprise analysis to determine, for example, that a barrel washer for produce was worth the investment because of its efficiency. They’ve also used enterprise analysis to determine how to charge a profitable price for their products. It’s clear Libbey takes good business planning seriously—people call and e-mail her for advice on such matters. But suddenly, the farmer cut herself off in mid-sentence.

“Pelicans! Awesome! I’ve always said I’d like to be reincarnated as a pelican,” she shouted as her head jerked skyward.

A couple dozen other heads followed Libbey’s lead. For a moment, farm finances, the predation of pesky deer, and what to charge for a dozen ripe tomatoes faded into the background as half a dozen black-and-white pelicans winged over us in elegant slow motion.

Later, while thinking about how a few aquatic birds had forced us all to live in the moment, I recalled a discussion I had years before with Libbey and Landgraf and their daughter Jess while we were walking the farm. It was about how deep, long-lasting change on many levels—farm, community, regional, and even national—won’t occur overnight. At one point Jess blurted out the word “glacial.” She was not referring to the farm’s geological history. After all, it took Libbey and Landgraf a few years to accept that agrarianism and environmentalism could preside on the same piece of real estate. Once they came to that realization, they struck upon a way of producing food that made room for bees, birds, and yes, even deer.

Libbey told me she and Landgraf—they are in their midfifties—are starting to accept the idea that One Step at a Time Gardens may not exist in the future as a working farm (life has taken each of their children’s paths in directions that don’t include farming). Now that they are beginning to wind down the business end of the operation, Tim and Jan inevitably wonder if they have had enough of an impact on the wider community to ensure people will always get the opportunity to take in a little wild drama while going about the daily business of making a living in agriculture. Ideally, an oasis like One Step at a Time will find a way to exist as a physical entity. But when one considers the sometimes overwhelming expanse of history, getting too attached to a physical piece of real estate may be naïve and a bit short-sighted. Maybe what we should be hanging onto, and promoting whenever possible, is the idea that with a little creativity and luck (and a lot of work), a wildly successful farm can rise within an industrialized landscape. Rocks, ice, soil, and even international grain markets come and go—ideas remain embedded in the collective human seedbank.

“Sometimes you get so wrapped up in the work that you want change to happen now,” Libbey told me once. “You have to have some patience and understand our work is only going to be a piece of it. Sometimes you need to sit back and feel good about the here and now.”