URBANDALE, Iowa — A new video released Monday pulls on heartstrings to show the challenges many Iowa farm families are facing in deciding the future of their land.
“Common Ground,” produced by videographer Ron Reynolds of Cedar Rapids, is named after the video’s soundtrack written by Marcy Rosenbaum of the Awful Purdies, an all-woman Eastern Iowa folk group. The group won an Iowa Arts Council award in 2014 to travel Iowa collecting stories of rural families, and Common Ground was part of the resulting collection called All Recipes Are Home.
“This is the hopeful story of people like those who contact us every day asking to protect their farms as farms for good,” explained Sustainable Iowa Land Trust President Suzan Erem. “We’re making sure future Iowans have access to healthy food produced right here, and offering relief to landowners who see limited choices for the future of their land.”
Erem added that labor-intensive fruit, vegetable and managed grazing farming attracts young people wanting to move to Iowa’s small towns and rebuild the state’s rural economies. The group is especially eager to protect parcels on the fringes of growing communities close to local foods markets.
“If you can fit a city park, a golf course or an airport into your town’s planning, you can fit a SILT farm,” Erem said. She added that the group has been receiving land donations and queries from all across Iowa, but only a qualified conservation organization can take on permanent land protection agreements that maintain family ownership over a property while still protecting it for generations to come.
The Sustainable Iowa Land Trust (SILT) commissioned the video to illustrate the challenge faced by farm families whose children have moved away, and how the next generation, even if unrelated, can carry on the farm tradition. SILT requires nature-friendly food production on land, stacking the benefits of conservation with agricultural opportunities. SILT is the newest land trust in Iowa and one of only two in the country that maintains such a high standard for land protection.
— The Sustainable Iowa Land Trust
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