Protecting Iowa's common wealth: Challenges for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Excerpt

IN a 1945 address that he called “The Outlook for Farm Wildlife,” Aldo Leopold assessed the post-war status of the American agricultural landscape from an ecological viewpoint

“Behind [certain destabilizing] trends in the physical status of the landscape lies an unresolved contest between two opposing philosophies of farm life. I suppose these have to be labelled for handy reference, although I distrust labels:

“1. The farm is a food factory, and the criterion of its success is salable products.

“2. The farm is a place to live. The criterion of success is a harmonious balance between plants, animals, and people; between the domestic and the wild; between utility and beauty.

“Wildlife has no place in the food-factory farm, except as the accidental relic of pioneer days. The trend of the landscape is toward a monotype, in which only the least exacting wildlife species can exist.

“On the other hand, wildlife is an integral part of the farm-as-a-place-to-live. While it must be subordinated to economic needs, there is a deliberate effort to keep as rich a flora and fauna as possible, because it is ‘nice to …