Back in 2003, a team of scientists from Iowa State University began to study how to best introduce conservation practices into working farmland without undermining the crop productivity of the fields in question. Officials in charge of the state’s agricultural experiment station system were somewhat skeptical of the effort, and did not want to give the team actual cropland within their control to undertake the experiment, so the study was launched in small fields within the boundaries of the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge, located about 20 miles east of the Iowa state capital in Des Moines.
The Refuge, named after a longtime Iowa Congressman, was established in 1990 “with the mission to actively protect, restore, reconstruct and manage the diverse native ecosystems of tallgrass prairie, oak savanna and sedge meadow”. Such ecosystems once covered 85 percent of the state’s area, but now account for about 0.1 percent in scattered fragments around the state.
One such fragment is located in my home town of Ames, a 22-acre plot of tall prairie grass behind the high school complex that was originally purchased by the Ames School District in 1956 for building a parking lot but the city’s residents voted in 1971 to preserve it in its original form. The area was grazed at some times in past decades but never cultivated. The site is currently managed by the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation under a long-term lease as of 2022.
The treatments they initially established on 12 small plots included 1) 100% row-crop, 2) 90% row-crop with 10% prairie at the bottom of the watershed, 3) 90% row-crop with 10% prairie integrated along strips, and 4) 80% row-crop with 20% prairie integrated along strips. After many years of painstaking research, they determined that option #3, a field with 10 percent prairie strips incorporated into an active cropping operation, offered the best environmental benefits while still preserving 95 percent of the field’s previous production levels. They also determined that species of tall prairie grasses and flowers, which were native to the Midwest prior to white settlers entering the region in the 1830’s after the U.S. government acquired the area from local native tribes under the settlement reached after the Black Hawk war, were the best choice for seeding those strips within the Iowa microclimes they were working in. The prairie strips program is promoted as the STRIPS program, an acronym which stands for Science-Based Trials of Row Crops Integrated with Prairie Strips.
Since that determination was made, numerous studies on the various potential benefits that could be created by the inclusion of prairie strips within working farmland have been conducted. These studies showed the soil erosion could be reduced by as much as 95 percent and fertilizer runoff by as much as 90 percent by including prairie strips in fields. Research also found that fields with prairie strips provide habitat for twice as many birds and bird species than those with 100 percent row crops. Prairie strips added as contour channels on sloped fields have been identified as an appropriate strategy to reduce runoff as part of Iowa’s Nutrient Reduction Strategy This strategy represents a science-based approach to reduce Iowa’s nutrient contribution to Iowa’s rivers and the entire Mississippi River Valley system. Twelve states within that river basin were mandated to establish such strategies in 2008 with a goal of reducing the nutrient load in the system and the size of the hypoxic zone that forms in the Gulf of Mexico in the year due to excess nutrient load.
Although many Iowa State faculty members have worked on this project over the years, the Co-Director of the University’s Bioeconomy Institute, Dr. Lisa Schulte Moore, has been the guiding force behind the project for most of that time and the public face of advocacy for prairie strips. For her inspirational work, Dr. Moore was awarded a McArthur Fellowship in 2021, popularly known as ‘genius grants’ which are awarded by the McArthur Foundation to celebrate and inspire the creative potential of recipients.
The reach of the STRIPS program was expanded in the 2018 farm bill, when USDA was required by Congress to establish it as an eligible practice under the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a conservation set-aside program operated by the Farm Service Agency (FSA). Designated as CP-43 when added to the practice handbook by USDA, farmers choosing to adopt this practice under their CRP contract can convert as much as 25% of their farm into native perennial vegetation. Under the Continuous CRP option, farmers can get as much as a 90 percent cost share to cover the cost of establishing the practice.
To date, farmers have enrolled 22,000 acres of their land to create prairie strips on fields totaling 115,000 acres across 14 states, with the majority being implemented in Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota. As more farmers learn of the massive environmental benefits associated with a fairly modest diversion of their cropland, one can hope that they will look to adopt this practice more broadly.
In a recent segment on prairie strips that aired on NBC News, one Iowa farmer explained that kids from his local high school were coming to his farm to get their senior high school photos taken while standing in his prairie strips, because “they’re so pretty”.
