‘Setting the Table for All Iowans’ provides blueprints for more localized food system
By Kyle Heim
The Iowa Food System Coalition developed its “Setting the Table for All Iowans” plan as a working document that provides the framework for bolstering Iowa’s local and regional food system over the next decade.
Unveiled during a July news conference with input from more than 40 farm and food system partners, the plan outlines a set of nine priorities that include increasing access to land, producing more locally grown and diversified food, and offering more financial resources to farmers.
“Agriculture on the larger scale is seeing a wider and wider chasm between the very large farms and the very small farms, with sort of losing that farmer infrastructure and systems in the middle. That’s impacting our local communities,” said Jan Libbey, former coordinator of the Iowa Food System Coalition who helped write “Setting the Table for All Iowans.” “And we see in the local and regional food system a great opportunity to really reclaim some of that opportunity and that economic development strategy, and at the same time, address significant and complex health and equity issues in our state.”
While small farms with fewer than 180 acres increased nearly 12% between 2002 and 2022, and farms with 2,000 or more acres rose 77%, midsize farms declined by nearly 23%, according to the U.S. Census of Agriculture.
Libbey said the coalition formed in June 2021, when the Coalition Steering Committee composed of core working groups that have been carrying out local food system work since the 1990s convened and expanded discussions to regional partners across the state.
The coalition leaned on Courtney Long with Iowa State University Extension and Outreach’s Farm Food and Enterprise Development group to lead the input process, Libbey said. Other groups involved in the process included the Iowa Farm to School and Early Care Coalition, the Iowa Regional Food Systems Working Group, the Iowa Food Hub Managers Working Group, the Iowa Farmers Union, the Center for Energy and Environmental Education at the University of Northern Iowa and the Heartland Regional Food Business Center in Iowa.
That was the core group of the Coalition Steering Committee that got the ball rolling, according to Libbey.
“We worked really hard to get the voices of underserved and socially disadvantaged farmers and partners into the conversation,” she said. “We talked to academics, we talked to government officials, we talked to schools, we talked to children at schools, food service directors, farmers, just a really broad range of folks who were able to have a hand in that conversation. And the conversation was fairly straightforward and simple.”
The conversations focused on three key questions:
What are the challenges?
What is your vision for the food system?
If you had a magic wand, what would our food system look like in 10 years or so?
“Those are key questions to really invite people’s imagination, and also to invite them to share from their perspective what we need to talk about from a very open and frank conversation about what’s not working right,” Libbey said. “And then, from your experience and perspective, all those different people, what do we need to do to move things in the direction of that vision?”
Iowa’s food import, export disparity
Informed by the input of more than 600 food system professionals and Iowa residents, the plan’s nine priorities are land and resource access; farm and food business development; farm and food system infrastructure; expanding local food purchasing and procurement; food, nutrition and health; environmental stewardship; labor equity, communication and education; and local food policy network.
Beth Hoffman, an author and farmer at Whippoorwill Creek Farm in Lovilia who helped write the “Setting the Table for All Iowans” plan, highlighted several factors that influenced the push to develop a more localized food system.
Among them were increased public interest in purchasing more locally grown food, more nutrient density in food grown locally and more diversity in crops.
“We have a situation where farmers in the state are in a really precarious situation because we just don’t have a diversity of products that are available for people to grow,” Hoffman said. “We don’t have the infrastructure right now where farmers can look at the market and the ecological and climate situation and make good decisions about it and say, ‘Well, you know, it looks like this crop or that crop might be really good for myself or my community,’ and make that kind of economic choice right now. Your choices are really corn or beans, maybe hogs.”
Iowa imports about 90% of its food, according to Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, despite 85% of Iowa’s land being used for agricultural production.
Nearly 75% of that land, or 23 million acres, is dedicated to growing two crops — corn and soybeans, according to the “Setting the Table for All Iowans” plan. “These crops are used primarily to feed livestock, generate ethanol, create processed food products and are heavily dependent on markets outside of Iowa.”
Iowa leads the nation in ethanol production. According to the Iowa Corn Growers Association, 62%, or 1.6 billion bushels, of the corn grown in the state is used to create nearly 30% of all U.S. ethanol. Additionally, about 370 million bushels, or 15% of Iowa’s corn, went directly into livestock feed.
Only 12,650 acres, representing a fraction of a percentage of Iowa land, are used for vegetable, fruit and berry production, according to the U.S. Census of Agriculture.
“The local, regional food system is very nimble and agile and able to adjust quickly,” Libbey said. “It’s sort of a two-sided piece. Yes, it is nimble, yes, it is able to start small, but we also need to help farmers grow and scale up. And that’s what much of the plan helps to point to in terms of the needed infrastructure if we want the local and regional food system to be a more significant part of our state’s food system and of the upper Midwest food system.
“Because of the population of Iowa, we want to feed as many people in Iowa as we can, and we also want to support farms that are able to tap into distribution networks that can help them be part of feeding other larger communities and finding that return on investment of all of their effort as well.” ν