Where Corn Is King, the Stirrings of a Renaissance in Small Grains

Breaking with the industrial model of growing corn and soybeans, a growing number of Iowa farmers are putting oats, rye, and other small grains into their crop rotation, a switch that is regenerating soils, cleaning up waters, and providing benefits to family farms.

Author: Twilight Greenaway | Published: November 28, 2017

To the untrained eye, Jeremy Gustafson’s 1,600-acre farm looks like all the others spread out across Iowa. Gazing at his conventional corn and soybean fields during a visit in June, I was hard-pressed to say where his neighbor’s tightly planted row crops ended and Gustafson’s began.

But what distinguished this vast farm in Boone, Iowa, was a thin, 16-acre strip of oats Gustafson had planted in a loop around the barn. At the time, the chest-high oats were at the “milk stage.” When Gustafson squeezed the grains embedded in the feathery grass between his thumb and forefinger, they released a tiny dollop of white liquid, a sign that they would be ready to harvest in about a month.

Oats and other “small grains” like rye and triticale stand out in Iowa — the nation’s number one producer of corn, a crop that covered more than 90 million U.S. acresin 2016 and was worth more than $51 billion. As is the case all over the Corn Belt, most Iowa corn is planted in rotation with another ubiquitous crop: soybeans. That Gustafson is willing to plant something other than corn and soy in Iowa makes him an outlier.

“I’m doing this for the soil,” says Gustafson, 40, and that’s a bigger deal than it may sound.

The majority of conventional farmers leave their soil barren for nearly half the year, exposing it to erosion in a state where some townships see as many as 64 tons of soil per acre run into waterways each year. Along with that soil come the remnants of fertilizer applications, in the form of nitrates and phosphorus, which foul drinking water, choke out aquatic life, and spur toxic algae blooms. Des Moines Water Works, the state’s largest water utility, spends an estimated $1.2 million per year to remove nitrates from drinking water to meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency safety levels.

To begin to counter that tide, Gustafson and a growing number of farmers are working to keep small grains and other plants in the soil year-round. Many say they decided to take this approach after meeting Sarah Carlson, a 38-year-old, no-nonsense agronomist from rural Illinois, who has spent the last decade alternately challenging and supporting hundreds of farmers from a small office in Ames, Iowa, with her colleagues at Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI). Their goal is to help producers diversify, improve their soil, and maintain autonomy within a landscape dominated by a handful of powerful agribusinesses. 

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