The U.S. Corn Belt is a matrix built for row crop agriculture that sprawls from central Pennsylvania to western Nebraska. As a result of two centuries worth of investment by U.S. taxpayers, over 90 million acres of corn are now annually grown, harvested, and shipped by rail, barge, and truck to food processors, feedlots, feed mills, ethanol refineries, and global ports for export. The corn production system is an efficient, precise, and robust machine. While it is amazing as a feat of human will and engineering, the negative consequences for our native biodiversity and natural infrastructure are profound.
How do we focus our will and engineering to create more space for nature within this region?
Railroads that cross through Iowa form boundaries for potential management areas. Credit: Iowa Railroad Commissioners.
We incorporate grass-based livestock into row crop agriculture by seeding cover crops that can be grazed; the current system stays in place but value is added. For grazing animals to access row crop fields we need corridors that serve as roads in a grazing network.
For example, in Iowa, many of the railroads once meandered alongside or near rivers. Lands immediately adjacent to railways could be reconstructed as silvopasture corridors and serve as a transition to row crop acres. In this transition area, grazing animals would move through the corridor accessing forage. Boxcars could be modular and serve individual functions to facilitate the management of the grazing network: solar crates to power mobile fencing energizers, livestock guardian drone platforms, ranching equipment and personnel transport, harvesting equipment and storage, etc. The railways themselves could serve as management area boundaries. With the development of a perennial-based grazing network that has railways at its center, the opportunities to stack enterprises is limited to the imagination.
A prairie strip could serve as a road to a larger silvopasture corridor and as an access point to row crop agriculture. Credit: Omar de Kok-Mercado
Connecting a river valley grazing network to row crop agriculture could be done with perennial strips of biomass. Just like a tributary feeds into a river, a prairie strip could be the connection point between row crop lands and a grazing network. These strips could be multifunctional as well, serving as diverse feedstocks for generating natural biogas, as solar grazing corridors, for honey production, for recreation, and more. Not all cover crops need to be grazed, either, and could be used to facilitate other markets. When the boundaries are blurred between row crop agriculture and adjacent land, the opportunity for production exponentially increases and the greater diversity facilitates a more stable ecosystem.
Incorporating grass-based livestock into row crop agriculture will take bold moves and a radical transformation of land use. We will need policy shifts and new taxpayer investments to make a vision like this a reality. We can keep producing corn but also add value to the system by developing new markets, incorporating diversity, and building resiliency. The positive consequences for our native biodiversity and natural infrastructure would be profound.
