CRAWFORDSVILLE, Iowa — Founded in 1987 during the depths of the farm crisis, Southeast Research and Demonstration Farm and the folks who make things grow there celebrated the farm’s 25th anniversary Thursday with confidence in agriculture’s future.
Nearly 300 people turned out for a free meal and the chance to see some of the corn, soybean and other crop research going on at the 274 acre farm, which straddles two counties — Louisa and Washington.
The day started the old-fashioned way: about three dozen people in attendance hopped aboard a hayrack for a tractor-led tour to look at plots of corn, soybeans, sorghum, cover crops and prairie grass, among others.
The farm is a cooperative venture between Iowa State University and the Southeast Iowa Agricultural Research Association, which combined to purchase the farm in 1987 for $290,000.
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Since then the farm has been visited by more than 25,000 people and been home to 818 research projects.
“This is what makes a land grant college great,” said Wendy Wintersteen, the dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at ISU. “It gives us reputation and purpose, and it’s a facility that has made a difference in your community.”
Cathann Kress, ISU vice president for Extension and Outreach, reminded the crowd that Iowa was the first state to embrace the land grant college idea and also the first to offer its residents cooperative extension services.
“Forward-thinking southeast Iowans made this [facility] possible, people thinking beyond a single county or a single concern,” she said.
Neil Harl, professor emeritus in ISU’s Department of Economics, delivered the keynote address on Iowa’s agricultural future.
That future’s mostly bright, he said — especially if one measures by average agricultural land prices, which were $787 per acre the year the research farm was founded and $6,708 per acre in December 2011.
Few people 25 years ago would have envisioned $15 per bushel soybeans and $8 for a bushel of corn, he said.
But they also couldn’t have envisioned agriculture’s current challenges: a toppling European economy, which could hurt farm exports, and a shift in U.S. government policy away from, for example, providing ethanol subsidies.
Fortunately for farmers, Harl said, quality soil and helpful climate can’t be exported to “the cheapest point on the globe” in the same way a manufacturing company can shift production. Soil and climate are, he noted, Iowa farmers’ most important competitive advantage.
Not that people haven’t tried to import agriculture’s means of production from elsewhere. Adolf Hitler, for example, ordered Ukranian topsoil be spread across German fields during World War II. The move didn’t help German food production, Harl said.
As American farms grow ever larger and technology improves, farm jobs could get scarcer, he said, and farmers will suffer even more if people around the world can’t buy the food American farmers produce because they don’t have enough money.
So policy-makers must work at helping to boost employment worldwide — while simultaneously giving their people the bitter medicine of less and less government spending, “because we’ve all been living beyond our means for too long,” Harl said.
“We are slowly gaining strength, but Europe is still teetering toward disaster,” he said. “My advice is buckle down, cut budgets and hand off good economic footing to the next generation, because anything less is not becoming of a great nation.”