Alejandro Plastina, assistant professor, and Wendiam Sawadgo, 5th year Ph.D. student, presented on Farmland Ownership and Environmental Impacts at the Annual Agriculture Conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago on Wednesday, November 20, 2019.
Iowa State University conducted a survey to analyze how conservation practices varied by ownership type for Iowa farmland. According to this survey, just 4% of Iowa farmland had cover crops in 2017. Notably, 6% of full-time owner-operators employed cover crops, while only 3% of part-time owner-operators and 4% of owners who never farmed their land used them. Plastina and Sawadgo showed that cover crops were used least on farmland owned by someone living outside Iowa for the entire year. One of the main reasons cited for not employing cover crops was the high associated cost in money and time.