Business : Webinar to focus on sustainability Sept. 29

The Iowa Learning Farms’ (ILF) monthly webinar, to be held Wednesday, Sept. 19 at 11:30 a.m., will feature Iowa State University agronomy professor Matt Liebman. The webinar is part of a free series, hosted by ILF, held on the third Wednesday of each month, through Adobe Connect. All that is needed to participate is a computer with Internet access.

Liebman will be sharing his presentation that he initially gave at the 2012 Iowa Water Conference entitled “Keys to Agricultural Sustainability and Resilience: A Scientist’s Perspective.”  Agriculture in the U.S. Corn Belt is under increasing pressure to produce greater quantities of food and fuel while better protecting environmental quality. Key environmental problems in this region include water contamination by nutrients and herbicides emitted from cropland, a lack of non-agricultural habitat to support diverse communities of plants and animals, and high dependence on petrochemical energy. Additionally, projected changes in climate, which include an increasing frequency of floods and droughts, could make soil and water conservation more difficult. Two projects that address these challenges in central Iowawill be discussed: the Marsden Farm rotation experiment, and the Science-based Trials of Row-crops Integrated with Prairies (STRIPs) experiment.

Matt Liebman is a professor of agronomy and the Henry A. Wallace Endowed Chair for Sustainable Agriculture at IowaStateUniversity. He is also a fellow of the American Society of Agronomy. He received a B.A. in biological sciences from HarvardUniversityand a Ph.D. in botany from the University of California-Berkeley. His research, teaching and outreach activities focus on ways to use ecological processes to maintain or increase agricultural production while reducing dependence on agrichemicals and fossil fuels. More information about his activities and responsibilities can be found at http://www.wallacechair.iastate.edu.

To connect to the webinars, go to: https://connect.extension.iastate.edu/ilf/.   Liebman will be able to answer questions from webinar “attendees” via the Adobe Connect chat box. The ILF website contains links for archived webinars from previous months: http://www.extension.iastate.edu/ilf/Webinars/.

Iowa Learning Farms is a partnership between the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, LeopoldCenterfor Sustainable Agriculture, Iowa Natural Resources Conservation Service and Iowa Department of Natural Resources (USEPA section 319); in cooperation with Conservation Districts of Iowa, the Iowa Farm Bureau and the IowaWaterCenter.