For Dennis Keeney, the move by the Iowa legislature to eliminate the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University is a deeply personal one. Keeney was the first permanent director of the center, serving from 1988 to 2000.
“Yes and no,” Keeney said when asked if he is surprised by the legislative move. “We’ve been expecting this for 20 years.”
The Leopold Center, created by legislation passed in the midst of the farm crisis of the 1980s, has always been charged with asking difficult questions and upsetting the status quo, he said. It was supposed to look at agriculture in different ways and to fund research into agricultural alternatives.
And yet he said the work of the center has helped farmers of all types — those in the conventional agricultural world and those in the alternative agricultural world need each other.
If the thought which appears to be behind the present move — that the work is done and the money could be spent better elsewhere — had been deployed 20 years ago, then research would not have been done that allows today’s conventional farmers to efficiently use cover crops, buffer strips and rotational grazing, Keeney said.
Keeney thinks back to the original words of the center’s namesake, Aldo Leopold: “to live on the land without spoiling it.”
Those words don’t ever sound outdated, he said. That goal is as real and important today as when Leopold first said them.
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