Upholding a Legacy

Upholding a Legacy

Farmers improve Iowa's land and water for generations to come.

By Rebekah Jones

I was about 10 years old when my dad Loras Hoeger took me out to our Eastern Iowa farm one spring to teach me about responsibility. He jumped out of our burgundy-colored diesel pickup (that he still owns today), walked about 50 feet into the field and put his knee into the dark, gritty dirt.

With the tip of his hat turned down to the ground, he used his big, calloused fingers to dig beneath the top layer of soil before scooping up a handful. He put it in my hands.

“This is called Downs soil,” he said. “It’s some of the best on the farm, and it’s ours to take care of.”

We continued walking, stopping for him to show me Dinsdale and Floyd soils, too.

I remember feeling something special when I saw his pride in that soil. Our family — of all the people in the world — had the blessing of protecting this little piece of earth.

Farmers can improve their crop by focusing first on nourishing the soil. Cover crops like rye, pictured here, keep nutrients in the field.

Healthy Soil Leads to Clean Water

Today, I am back in agriculture, connecting the dots between healthy soil and clean water as Iowa Agriculture Water Alliance’s (IAWA) communications director.

Healthy soil is alive with earthworms, microbes and helpful fungi. It leads to cleaner water because it absorbs more nutrients and water, preventing them from flowing downstream. Plus, tactics to create healthy soil (like planting cover crops outside the corn and soybean season) also prevent soil particles from eroding into local waterways.

Iowa Corn, the Iowa Soybean Association and the Iowa Pork Producers Association formed IAWA as a nonprofit in 2014 to help improve water quality through not only cover crops and no-till but also wetlands, prairie, stream buffers and more.

“There were many things that we knew were possible,” said Craig Floss, CEO of Iowa Corn and one of three founders of IAWA. “There were a lot of practices that we knew would ultimately make a difference. But we had to show farmers how to get involved in these opportunities.”

Since 2014, IAWA has helped secure more than $220 million and counting for on-farm conservation, impacted more than 4 million acres and partnered with more than 100 organizations.

“Helping the environment, leaving something better for the next generation. I can look back and say, you know we’re making a difference,” said Anthony Montag, vice president of Montag Manufacturing and member of the IAWA Business Council, a group of agri-business sustainability leaders.

The Montag story is one of my favorites. Like many of our partners, it has humble beginnings with deep roots.

Anthony’s dad, Roger, began the business officially in 2005 after decades of “tinkering in the shed” — as he calls it. Now, his kids run an international conservation equipment company driven by their dad’s values of respecting God’s creation. It’s a value instilled early. Anthony remembers at-home science lessons with soil testing kits as a kid.

There are more living microbes in a teaspoon of soil than there are people on earth.

Water Quality Starts Upstream

“If you lose the soil and ruin the water, it’s tough to bring it back,” warned Dan Voss as he showed me around his farm in Linn County last year. It’s just upstream of the Cedar Rapids water treatment facility, which serves 128,201 people.

He has cover crops, no-till, strip-till, waterways, buffer strips, prairie, a saturated buffer and a bioreactor, plus more additions in the works. Improving yields and reducing costs led to some of the conservation practices. Others were simply the “right thing to do,” he told me.

“When we started in 1988, many people thought we were nuts,” Voss said. “But I think that made us want to succeed even more.”

And succeed, he did. This winter, he won the Iowa Soybean Association Environmental Leader Award, and he says his yields have never been better.

Not all farmers will use as many conservation practices as Voss, but they can choose at least one way to improve their soil and their community’s water.

The key is picking the practices that work for their unique farms.

Crews install a saturated buffer in the Cedar Valley, where cities and farms are working together to batch installations.

Photo courtesy of Evan Brehm

My dad drove out to Greenfield in Central Iowa to see the new farm. He has no shortage of insightful stories about his lifetime of farming and what he learned from his dad about taking care of the land.

Photo courtesy of Rebekah Jones

Coming Full Circle

With my husband’s family, we bought our own small farm in 2021 in central Iowa.

That spring, my dad called me up. I was walking my dog in Des Moines.

“I’m on my way,” he said, one hour into a two-hour drive. He likes to surprise me. “We’re going to look at that new farm.”

We rode out to the field together. He jumped out of his pickup, walked 50 feet into the field and put his knee in the soil — 20 years later, 220 miles away from the farm I was raised on.

“Not bad,” he said scooping up a handful of it and analyzing it.

Later, we talked about the responsibility of owning land.

“You don’t own it,” he corrected me. “You are borrowing it until the next generation.”

This past fall, we planted our first cover crop, sprouts of golden wheat scattered across the land, which will be our legacy.

You don’t own it, you are borrowing it until the next generation.