As a proud graduate of the University of Iowa, my foray into farming and farm policy has necessarily meant a great deal of interaction with graduates of Iowa State, the Hawkeye State’s land grant university.  I expected to experience considerable ribbing as alma mater lost the Hawkeye-Cyclone football game last year, in triple-overtime, no less!  While the many Cyclones that I met during this trip have not disappointed me on that point, I have realized that Iowa State carries a big punch in the state.  As it turns out, Moo U and its agriculture college graduates and faculty rank as incredibly important players in shaping the nation’s food system as well as that of the world.  Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney, the stars of King Corn, showed that the discoveries of Iowa State researchers were among the reasons that catapulted corn into its lofty status as the King of Plants.   Ellis and Cheney’s perspective seems understated compared to our experience—even though the now-famous duo spent plenty of time with members of the Cyclone nation. 

Iowa State’s graduates have been well trained in production agriculture and in defending that perspective.  Even more importantly, however, whether discussing GMOs, CAFOS (both in terms of pork and poultry), pesticide, herbicide, and fungicide use, or manure management, ISU provides the “science” to back why a particular practice is not harmful or even desirable.  And devotees of Iowa State are quick to wed their pride of alma mater to the science produced by the University to back commodity agriculture.  Of course, large agribusiness concerns (whether Cargill, ADM, or Monsanto) are deeply involved in the financing of the agriculture college.   Reduced research budgets from state and federal governments necessarily mean that scholars are looking for research dollars in other places, and I must say that it is concerning to see this kind of potential for corporate control of the “science” that is regularly touted to back commodity agriculture.  The result is that I’ve become increasingly concerned about whether “science” is really very helpful in making decisions about the future of food policy. 

Production agriculture advocates favor controlling Mother Nature and bending her will to produce crops that have higher yields and can be produced more economically.  Iowa State and her graduates have been at the forefront of the mechanical , biological, and chemical revolution that has transformed farming since WWII.  And while the University has clearly pushed its finger on production agriculture side of the scale, it has not ignored sustainable agriculture—Iowa State, after all, does have the only graduate program in sustainable agriculture in the nation.  And one should not take lightly the many contributions to sustainable ag policy brought forward by the Aldo Leopold Center, also housed at ISU.  As with so much of agriculture policy, there is lot of evidence to back one’s initial working hypothesis–in this case that Iowa State and Big Agriculture are attached at the hip–but it is also is clear that there are programs, faculty, and students in Ames who are strongly committed to sustainable agriculture. 

I’ll still cheer for Iowa, but this experience has utterly transformed my view of Iowa State.  It may be the cow college, but my initial analysis shows that it wields a lot more clout in the land between the Mississippi and the Missouri than my close-minded, naïve perspective previously understood.