Making room for prairie STRIPs in Iowa’s cornbelt

A Field Talk interview with Lisa Schulte Moore (Land Sharing/Sparing #1)

Soil erosion….or not. Even small amounts of perennials can have a dramatic impact on the environmental benefits provided by row-cropped agricultural lands. This image depicts the ability of native prairie to keep soil in farm fields, where it can produce crops, as opposed to allowing it to move into streams, where it becomes a serious pollutant. The STRIPS Project has shown that farm fields with just 10% of their area converted to native prairie produce diverse environmental benefits in amounts greatly disproportionate to their extent compared to fields entirely in row-crop production. This image was taken after a 4 inch rain. Caption by Lisa Schulte Moore, photo by Dave Williams.

Lisa Schulte Moore, a professor of natural resource ecology and management at Iowa State University, explains how Science-based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairies (STRIPs) help farms, waterways, and wildlife.

Listen to the interview, and find show notes and links to entities mentioned in this week’s episode, on the Field Talk homepage.

Listen – click to go to the show.

This is the first interview in a series exploring “land-sparing” and “land-sharing” strategies to conserve wildness and a rich tapestry of species in our human dominated world.

Schulte Moore discussed this project with a happy hour crowd at the Aster in Minneapolis during ESA’s annual meeting last August, as the pilot speaker at our inaugural Science Cafe.