Thirty miles south of Phoenix, green fields of alfalfa and pima cotton stretch toward a triple-digit sun. Hundreds of yellow butterflies dance above the purple flowers that dapple the tops of the young alfalfa stalks—to expert eyes, the flowers signal that the plants are heat-stressed and should be harvested soon.

Gila River Farms near Sacaton has been growing alfalfa and high-end cotton—which is named after the Pima people who inhabited the Gila and Salt river valleys—for 50 years. That’s a long time by current standards but merely a flash considering that the roots of Arizona’s agriculture reach back thousands of years.

Today, Native Americans are the primary operators of more than half of all farms or ranches in the state, making Arizona’s agriculture landscape unique compared with other states, according to the 2014 national agriculture census. Native American farmers sold nearly $67 million worth of agricultural products in 2012, about 2 percent of the $3.7 billion in agricultural products sold in Arizona that year, according to the Arizona Farm Bureau.

Native American farmers grow crops as diverse as tepary beans, olives, and squash, some for community use and some sent around the world. The Navajo and Hopi tribes feed their communities by focusing on cultural traditions, including dryland farming.

Centuries-old Tradition Expands Internationally

Stephanie Sauceda, interim general manager for Gila River Farms, said the farm is the original test site funded by the federal government to grow and harvest extra-long staple pima cotton, which is considered a superior strain.

Farming extends back centuries for indigenous people, she said.

“It was just something that Native American people do, not only in Gila River, but also in other tribes. That’s how we survived,” Sauceda said. “We did the hunting of the animals, we grew our corn and our wheat, and that’s how we actually survived—how our ancestors survived.”

The natural next step, she said, is to send crops to the rest of the world.

Gila River Farms primarily grows cotton and alfalfa but in recent years has branched out to increase citrus production and experiment with olive crops, said Garcia, the farm’s assistant general manager.

Sauceda said alfalfa and cotton, which are the farm’s most profitable products, end up in such places as the Philippines, Vietnam and China.

“We represent the community with our products that go out the door,” said Sauceda, who’s only the second woman to be general manager. She and her employees take pride in being able to bring their product into the global market.

“We have a really good name out there.”

The farm is growing crops on 10,000 acres, rotating alfalfa and cotton on much of that land, Sauceda said. It generates about $10 million annually.

Planting Seeds of Native Tradition

In northern Arizona, members of the Hopi Tribe maintain their cultural and traditional heritage through farming, said Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a Hopi doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona’s School of Renewable Natural Resources and the Environment.

“For Hopi, farming is our way of life,” Johnson said.

Hopi farmers own small plots of 1 to 9 acres and use the traditional technique of dryland farming, which means crops rely only rainfall, Johnson said. Dryland farming requires seeds be planted deeper than crops for commercial use, he said.

Hopi agriculture largely is subsistence-based, meaning farmers grow food for their families rather than for commercial sale, Johnson said.

Wrangling Tradition with Women as Leaders

One hundred miles south of where the four corners of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado meet, three members of the Navajo Nation lead a biweekly farm-board meeting.

The two women and one man conduct the meeting in both English and Diné to be sure the older generation can understand policy changes and upcoming projects.

The farm board discusses a five-year project to update fencing, irrigation and farm equipment.

On the Navajo Reservation, farming and ranching work hand-in-hand, said Lorena Eldridge, farm board president of the tribe’s Tsaile Wheatfields-Black Rock Chapter.

Navajo farmers differentiate themselves from most U.S. farms in a key way: Nearly half of all farms on the reservation are operated primarily by a woman, Eldridge said.

According to the 2012 agriculture census, women represent about 30 percent of the total number of American farmers, but only 14 percent of farms are operated by a woman.

Still, younger generations are moving away from farming on reservations.

One third of all Native American farmers are older than 65. Eldridge is working to secure investments from the Navajo Nation government to attract younger people to farming. The farm board secured $5 million for the five-year project, which will complete its first year in December.

“For me, the farm board connects me to my history and culture,” Eldridge said.

Savoring Tradition in Native Crops

Some Native American farmers carry on crop-based traditions, whether for commercial or community uses.

Blue corn, beans, and traditional teas and berries, such as greenthread tea and sumac berries, are grown on Native American farms across Arizona.

Ramona and Terry Button pulled the native bavi bean, commonly referred to as the tepary bean, from the brink of obscurity in the late 1970s, said Velvet Button, their daughter.

Drought had put many other local farmers out of business, but Ramona Farms on the Gila River Reservation survived, in part based on reclaiming a bean that had been around for centuries.

Native American communities had “lost touch” with the tepary bean and other traditional native foods, Velvet Button said.

“We lost our market when large grocery stores moved in closer to the reservations and took over the mom and pop shops that were servicing the rural communities,” she said.

The tepary bean comes in black, white, blue speckled, and other colors, Button said, and is an important staple food for several tribes.

Ramona Farms, family owned and operated, generates 90 percent of its income from such commercial crops as cotton, wheat and alfalfa, but the Button family’s passion is promoting and educating people about indigenous foods.

Water scarcity, the proliferation of grocery stores and a lack of agriculture education and policy have been hurdles to food sovereignty that organizations such as the Indigenous Food Systems Network and the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance are working to overcome.

“The huge food sovereignty movement has helped connect us once again as indigenous communities and our traditional food sources,” Button said. “Our communities are so remote that we need to be able to sustain ourselves.”

According to 2016 data published by the Arizona Department of Health Services, American Indians are disproportionately affected by chronic diseases, such as diabetes. Native Americans die at three times the rate to diabetes compared with the state’s average the report said.

Refocusing on traditional foods and incorporating them in new recipes has been a stepping stone to improving the community’s health education, Button said.

“When you see the community growing their own food, being involved in the process—it really makes a difference,” Johnson said. “When you give people access to this, you see rates of diabetes going down and you see everyone’s well-being going up.”

This article originally appeared on Cronkite News and is reprinted with permission.

For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org. Cronkite News, the news arm of Arizona PBS, is operated by Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications and staffed by students of the school.

It’s rare to see Lorenzen and White’s demographic taking over land. Because retiring farmers need income to sustain them through their later years, they often sell to developers or to large corporate or expanding family farms at a price that small farmers can’t afford, says Neil Thapar, an attorney with the Sustainable Economies Law Center.

“They don’t have a safety net for retirement, but from their farming career they have assets, land, equipment. They can’t sell that to next-generation farmers because [the next generation] doesn’t have access to the kind of capital they need to buy at $7,000 per acre,” he says.

That scenario is the driving force behind a steady consolidation of the nation’s farmland. A USDA report published in March found that large farms own more of the nation’s farmland compared to a few decades ago. In 1987, farms with over 2,000 acres operated 15 percent of the nation’s farmland; by 2012, that number had grown to 36 percent.

“If we don’t do something now to offer new options and new tools, all we are going to see is consolidation,” says SILT director Suzan Erem. “People tend to go with what they know. What’s out there is ‘I grow corn, my neighbor grows corn, so my land will go to my neighbor.’ So that 10,000-acre guy just went to 10,500.”

The USDA report noted that consolidation is also happening through contract farming, as large corporate firms play a coordination role in U.S. farming, particularly in hog and poultry production. Some firms—for example, in specialty crops, cattle feedlots, poultry, and hogs—operate multiple farms.

But there’s also the concern, voiced by The Oakland Institute and others, that huge investors and pension funds, such as TIAA-CREF, the Hancock Agricultural Investment Group (HAIG), and UBS Agrivest—an arm of the bank’s global real estate division—have a bottomless appetite for farmland, purchasing up parcels and adding to a lack of access and affordability.

“Over the next 20 years, 400 million acres, or nearly half of all U.S. farmland, is set to change hands as the current generation retires. With an estimated $10 billion in capital already looking for access to U.S. farmland, institutional investors openly hope to expand their holdings as this retirement bulge takes place,” according to the Institute’s 2014 report, “Down on the Farm: Wall Street: America’s New Farmer.”

The farmland-conservation advocacy group American Farmland Trust echoes this concern. The group notes that people over 65 years old own 40 percent of the nation’s farmland, and a major transfer of the agricultural land and wealth is afoot. As of now, large farms are scooping up most of that property, raising questions of what that means for the average food consumer and the small farmer.

The uncertainty that situation creates is compounded by the expiration of the 2014 Farm Bill at the end of September. Negotiations for a new farm bill are underway, but it’s unclear what it may hold for funding for some of the most effective measures in place to slow consolidation. Depending on whether the version passed by the House or the Senate—or some combination of two—is approved, funding for conservation efforts like those that are part of the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP) may double or be eliminated. ACEP provides money for state and local agencies to “buy-protect-sell” farmland, which is one of the most effective tools available in preserving farmland and preventing further consolidation.

Meanwhile, a growing number of nonprofits and land trusts like SILT are using a combination of agricultural conservation easements and other measures to reduce the cost of land to make it accessible to the next generation of farmers.

The face of that generation is increasingly diverse, according to Julia Freedgood, assistant vice president of programs at American Farmland Trust.

Freedgood works with a nationwide network of ag-industry people who are developing a curriculum to teach new farmers financial skills. The old saying that the only route into farming is “through the cradle or altar” is less true these days, as more immigrants and refugees want to start farms in places like Idaho, she says. In California, many Latinx and Hmong farmworkers want their own land. So do young, college-educated people “inspired by the local food movement,” and city-dwellers inspired by the urban ag movement.

“You have this really diverse group that wants to get into farming, but they all face the barrier of land access,” Freedgood says.

Why Consolidation Is a Problem

Land consolidation is tied to power and control—it puts the wealth generated by the nation’s agriculture industry into fewer hands. This directly impacts accessibility: what and how most Americans will eat. Ultimately, the issue is structural, and opportunities for meaningful change lie in addressing the needs of retiring farmers and those entering the industry.

“It gets at the core of our economic system and challenges the notion of capitalism as the way to organize our food economy,” Thapar says. “The consolidation trend will continue until there are significant reforms on how people access capital to acquire land, and how farming can become a livelihood that people can rely on without having to sell land to retire.”

Thapar notes that change needs to happen at a policy level. The good news is that there is a patchwork of laws and funding at the state and federal level to help create that change; the bad news is that the patchwork is patchy—farmers in different states face very different options for financial support.

The federal government hasn’t enacted any sort of meaningful legislation or rules that protect and promote small-scale farming—most recently, Obama pledged and failed to do so during his presidency. The standardization that comes with commodity stock production also over time made it easier for farms to consolidate, leaving fewer operators with greater influence on policy decisions designed to promote commodity stock production. That’s helped lead to the creation of crop insurance and commodity-linked direct payments programs, for example.

A patchwork of laws and state and federal funding that helps address the situation. At the federal level, the farm bill provides $31 million for farmland preservation, but that money is often targeted for cuts by Republicans and lobbyists for big business. In Minnesota, the state provides tax breaks for those who sell or lease equipment to small farmers. Rhode Island launched a program in which it buys farmland from retiring landowners, then sells it to young or new farmers for below-market rate.

Freedgood has worked to enact easement programs in Ohio and Michigan, and is attempting to do the same in other Midwestern states such as Indiana (though she says it doesn’t currently have the “political will”). She also points to state-level programs like California Farm Link and Hudson Valley Farmland Finder, which are “actively working with agriculture service providers and land trusts, and are the brokers to help make deals happen.”

Offering capital gains tax breaks to retiring farmers who sell to younger farmers could be a strong incentive because “it can make a significant difference in the net bottom line,” says Jerry Cosgrove, farm legacy director with AFT.

Thapar suggests a pension program that provides annuity payments to independent farmers so they don’t have to rely on land and asset sales to pay for their retirement.

Making Farmland Affordable

Land trusts are offering “measures to address what can broadly be called land access and affordability issues, particularly for young or other socially disadvantaged farmers,” Cosgrove says.

The measures can be complicated, but they’re working. Cosgrove says AFT helped Zack and Annie Metzger—who are in their mid-30’s—purchase land from a retiring farmer in Troy, N.Y. The land held a conservation easement and affordability deed restriction, and its owner asked for over $650,000. The Metzgers decided to sell the easement and deed restriction to raise capital, but couldn’t do so until they owned the property. That required a bridge loan through Equity Trust. The sales of the easement and affordability deed helped pay off that loan.

The Metzgers sold the deed restriction to a local nonprofit conservation group that holds it and is obligated to enforce its terms. The state of New York provided the funding for the nonprofit to purchase easement, and it can only be sold to a nonprofit or municipality.

“We’re privileged people, we come from a great background, but not to where we have the wealth to purchase a property … with an appraised value [of around $650,000],” Zack Metzger said. On Laughing Earth Farm, the Metzgers now offer humanely and organically raised pigs, chickens, and turkey. Laughing Earth’s vegetables go to local CSAs, and they sell freshly cut wildflowers at farmers’ markets.

AFT typically purchases land or takes a land donation, puts it in an easement, seeks an affordability deed restriction, then leases the land long-term to a younger farmer. So far, about 6.5 million acres of farm and ranch land are preserved in land trusts, according to a 2017 survey conducted by AFT, which the agency says is a conservative estimate. That’s up from about 4.7 million in 2012.

In Iowa, SILT uses a similar strategy. The owner of the land on which Jupiter Ridge operates donated his deed to SILT because he’s interested in preserving it for sustainable food farming. When he decides he no longer wants to control the land (or he dies), White and Lorenzen will enter into a long-term lease with SILT. They can also own the land’s home and other buildings, and they can pass it on to younger farmers or their kids when they’re ready to retire, or SILT will place a conservation easement on the land if for some reason they must sell. Either way, the land is preserved for sustainable farming in perpetuity.

Jupiter Ridge represents 22 of 770 acres under SILT’s protection, and Erem expects that number to grow quickly.

In New Hampshire, Agrarian Trust, a nonprofit group working to increase land access for farmers, will soon begin purchasing land. It’s partnering with local land trusts that will own the properties, acquire a conservation easement, and function as a “farm commons” that will manage a 99-year lease with a young farmer. Agrarian Trust will support and have some level of controlling interest over the local nonprofit. It’s partly focusing on regions in which there is little in the way of agricultural conservation efforts, like the Southeast.

Poudre Valley Community Farms in Colorado is using a slightly different model. The group just made its first purchase: a 109-acre farm with a five-bedroom house, corrals, and outbuildings for $1.3 million. Poudre Valley is controlled by a multi-stakeholder cooperative that board member Zia Zybko characterizes as “truly community supported”—if the farm has a problem, the cross-section of the community that invested in the farm works together to find a solution.

Ultimately, it’s going to take a coordinated effort at the federal level and among those working at the local level, instead of a patchwork of independent agencies operating toward a similar goal Thapar says. “There are some systemic changes that need to happen, and there needs to be a broader coalition working on this,” he notes. Specifically, he suggests reviving the USDA AELOS survey that retrieves landowner information and demographics, farmland rent control policies, re-funding federal and state land preservation programs, promoting state-based land ownership surveys, and providing reliable funding mechanisms for land trusts and land cooperatives.

But beyond that, Thapar says, there needs a collective philosophical shift away from land being viewed as a “financial asset—something that you own to make money from in the future.”

Molly Schintler and Derek Roller of Echollective Farm have been growing a diverse array of vegetables on 19 acres 25 miles outside Iowa City since 2001. While the farm is not certified organic, they use sustainable methods, crop rotation, and other eco-friendly practices and steward 20 acres of woodland in an effort to put people and the environment first.

“Obviously being a viable business is important,” said farmer Molly Schintler. “But it’s also really our priority to be thinking about how we can best feed our community in a way that’s good for the planet.”

To help balance those interests, Echollective recently signed onto the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) program that encourages comprehensive natural resource conservation on working lands.

Molly Schintler and Derek Roller of Echollective Farm. (Photo credit: Giselle Bruskewitz, Food Hub Manger at Field to Family)

The program will recognize Echollective for its past conservation efforts and requires the farmers to enhance their current practices with additional activities. With the CSP funds, Schintler and Roller will mulch large areas, run soil tests, and plant nearly an acre of native fruit trees and pollinator habitat over the next five years.

“These are things that we want to do anyway, but it’s easy to not make them a priority,” Schintler said. “We signed that contract, so for us it’s a binding agreement that we’ll get these things done.”

The Nation’s Leading Conservation Program

The Conservation Stewardship Program began as the Conservation Security Program in the 2002 Farm Bill, and its current iteration was first authorized in the 2008 bill. The nation’s leading conservation program by acreage, CSP pays farmers to improve their practices in ways that benefit the air, water, and soil without taking land out of rotation like the Conservation Reserve Program requires them to do. It focuses on continual conservation and bases compensation on several factors, including time and resources invested and the expected degree of conservation benefits.

As of 2017, CSP covered an estimated 72 million acres; the vast majority of those acres are on large, conventional farms such as the thousands of Iowa corn and soy operations that surround Echollective—operations where farmers are generally less likely to have conservation practices on their to-do lists without funding.

The future of the program and Echollective’s contract are uncertain, however. The 2014 Farm Bill expired on September 30 after Congress proved unable to agree on a new bill, in part because of disputes over CSP and debate over cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The House of Representatives has proposed cutting CSP and rolling its “best features” into the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), a similar conservation program for working lands without a long-term commitment. If this happened, EQIP would absorb $3 billion previously allocated for CSP. The Senate’s more moderate farm bill, on the other hand, would maintain the status quo and maintain the separate programs. Either way, the direction Congress goes will have major implications for farmers and natural resources around the U.S.

Spotlight on Iowa 

In Iowa, farm conservation focuses mainly on the interlocking challenges of soil health and water quality. A lack of crop diversity, reliance on synthetic fertilizers, and the fact that much of the soil sits uncovered by plant life for around six months a year in the ag-intensive Corn Belt make soil susceptible to nutrient loss.

“We know the corn and soybean system is what we call a ‘leaky system,’ so it leaks nutrients,” said Chris Jones, a research engineer with the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research.

Jones said the two main nutrients of concern, phosphorus and nitrogen, leak differently. Phosphorus mainly enters streams through overland runoff. As water travels across the surface of exposed soil, it picks up phosphorus particles and carries them into nearby waterways. In Iowa, all rivers and streams eventually drain to the Mississippi.

Highly soluble nitrogen dissolves in the water, and moves through networks of underground pipes called drainage tile. These systems keep once-waterlogged fields dry enough to cultivate but flush nutrients into the same waterways. Not only have nitrogen levels reached a crisis level in Iowa, where filtration costs millions and public utilities have been pitted against farm communities, but runoff from the state (along with 31 others) makes a significant contribution to the algae blooms that have created a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, where low-oxygen conditions are inhospitable to life.

A study Jones and his colleagues published in April found that Iowa contributes on average about 29 percent of Mississippi River dissolved nitrate, though it only accounts for 5 percent of the total land draining into the river.

Conservation practices such as planting cover crops, adding streamside vegetative buffers, and cutting down on tillage can help keep soil and nutrients from entering the water. Ultimately, Jones thinks increasing crop diversification with less leaky options is the best solution.

Jones said government conservation programs like CSP and EQIP are crucial to implementing such solutions in Iowa, where only about 2 percent of land is under state or federal control. Implementing conservation solutions on private land requires accessible programs that incentivize active conservation or land retirement, he added.

“In Iowa this land is so extremely valuable, compared to other farmland in other parts of the U.S. or the world, so land retirement is probably not something that’s going to happen in the short term,” Jones continued. “We need programs that target working lands.”

Some conservationists worry that if the farm bill rolls CSP into EQIP, conservation practices like those needed to solve Iowa’s water problem will take a hit.

“[CSP] is a very vital program across the country because it’s a program that has milestones and benchmarks,” said Alex Schmidt, president of the Conservation Districts of Iowa.

He said about half of Iowa counties invest more money in CSP versus EQIP. The preferred program depends on local needs and the approach of the county’s conservation commissioners. He worries that lapsed a gap in funding between now and whenever the new farm bill passes will further stall a sizable backlog of Iowa farmers waiting for acceptance into conservation programs.

The Farm Bill and the Future of Farmland Conservation

Schmidt said the draft Senate farm bill is the best case-scenario for conservation because it keeps the two programs separate.

Alyssa Charney, senior policy specialist for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), agrees. “The Senate really offers a bipartisan path forward for getting a farm bill passed across the line, and that is especially true for conservation programs,” she said.

She also takes issue with much of the public messaging around the House’s proposed elimination of the Conservation Stewardship Program. “It’s inaccurate to call it a merge or ever a consolidation of programs because it’s not keeping the core elements of CSP.”

Those core elements include the CSP’s eligibility threshold and comprehensive nature, which require producers to take the conservation practices they have already implemented “above and beyond.”

Charney said most of the House’s proposed $3 million boost to EQIP likely would not go to stewardship-type contracts, based on language in the House draft. She said that because acreage eligible for CSP is divided based on the proportion of a state’s total agricultural land, states like Iowa in the middle of the country will take the hardest hit.

Conservation practices needed to solve Iowa’s nutrient runoff problems, like diversified crop rotation and cover cropping, are the types of high-level activities CSP currently promotes, Charney said. And losing that would be a big blow to the state, and others like it. Iowa Senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley expressed support for maintaining current CSP funding through their proposed GROW Act in March.

Laura Crowell, the Iowa public affairs officer for USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), said EQIP is Iowa’s number one conservation program, though both ultimately help get conservation on the ground.

“All of our programs follow the same standards and specifications,” she said, “so whether it’s CSP or EQIP, it’s going to be the same practices and the benefits will be the same.”

She said there is a lot of overlap in activities both programs encourage, and stressed the importance of soil health for both farmers and nature.

Cromwell said current CSP contracts must legally be funded until they expire regardless of the program’s status in the new Farm Bill.

Farmer Schintler still worries, though. She said Echollective would not be able to complete all their designated projects without CSP funding, and would certainly be unable to re-enroll in the program after five years.

“As a farmer, you’re not paid for your time,” she said. “I feel really respected in a program that says they’re going to pay me for that time and effort. That’s definitely not the norm.”

Schintler said she’d support the potential change if it streamlined processes or helped the overall farm bill budget. But she questions why congress would cut such a reputable conservation program considering the serious water and air quality challenges we face as a nation.

And she notes, conservation matters for everyone who eats, breathes, or drinks water. “The food system allows everybody else to do all the things they do on a daily basis. They should care about food producers and the farm bill,” Schintler said.

If you’ve perused the new 50-State Food System Scorecard from the Union of Concerned Scientists, you’ve probably noticed a seeming contradiction. As shown on the map below, the heavily agricultural states in the middle of the country aren’t exactly knocking it out of the park when it comes to the overall health and sustainability of their food and farming systems. On the contrary, most of the leading farm states of the Midwest reside in the basement of our overall ranking.

OVERALL STATE FOOD SYSTEM RANKINGS

So what’s that about? A couple of reasons stand out to me.

First, much of what the Midwest grows today isn’t really food (much less healthy food).

It’s true. While we often hear that the region’s farmers are feeding America and the world, in fact much of the Midwest’s farm output today is comprised of just two crops: corn and soybeans. There are various reasons for that, including some problematic food and farm polices, but that’s the reality.

Take the state of Indiana, for example. When I arrived there in 1992 for graduate school (go Hoosiers!), I bought the postcard at right. That year, Indiana farmers had planted 6.1 million acres of corn, followed by 4.55 million acres of soybeans. Together, the two crops covered more than two-thirds of the state’s total farm acres that year.

The situation remains much the same today, except that the crops have switched places: this year, Indiana farmers planted 6.2 million acres of soybeans and “just” 5.1 million acres of corn. Nationwide, soybean acreage will top corn in 2018 for the first time in 35 years.

Regardless of whether corn or soy reigns supreme, the fact is that most of it isn’t destined for our plates. Today, much of the corn goes into our gas tanks. The chart below shows how total U.S. corn production tracked the commodity’s use for ethanol from 1986 to 2016:

The two dominant Midwest crops also feed livestock to produce meat in industrial feedlots, and they become ingredients for heavily processed foods. A 2013 Scientific American essay summarized the problem with corn:

Although U.S. corn is a highly productive crop, with typical yields between 140 and 160 bushels per acre, the resulting delivery of food by the corn system is far lower. Today’s corn crop is mainly used for biofuels (roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol) and as animal feed (roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn, plus distillers grains left over from ethanol production, is fed to cattle, pigs and chickens). Much of the rest is exported.  Only a tiny fraction of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, much of that for high-fructose corn syrup.

All this is a big part of why, when UCS assessed the extent to which each U.S. state is producing food that can contribute to healthy diets—using measures including percentage of cropland in fruits and vegetables, percentage of cropland in the top three crops (where a higher number means lower diversity), percentage of principal crop acres used for major animal feed and fuel crops, and meat production and large feeding operations per farm acres—we arrived at this map:

RANKINGS BY FOOD PRODUCED

As you can see, the bottom of our scorecard’s “food produced” ranking is dominated by Midwestern states. This includes the nation’s top corn-producing states—Iowa (#50) and Illinois (#48), which together account for about one-third of the entire U.S. crop. It also includes my one-time home, Indiana (#49), where just 0.2 percent of the state’s 14.7 million farm acres was dedicated to vegetables, fruits/nuts, and berries in 2012.

Now let’s switch gears to look at another reason the Midwest performs so poorly overall in our scorecard.

Today’s Midwest agriculture tends to work against nature, not with it.

In addition to the fact that the Midwest currently produces primarily non-food and processed food crops, there’s also a big problem with the way it typically produces those commodities. Again, for a number of reasons—including the shape of federal farm subsidies—the agricultural landscape in states such as Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana is dominated by monoculture (a single crop planted year after year) or a slightly better two-crop rotation (you guessed it, corn and soybeans).

These oversimplified farm ecosystems, combined with the common practice of plowing (AKA tilling) the soil before each planting, degrade the soil and require large applications of fertilizer, much of which runs off farm fields to pollute lakes and streams. Lack of crop diversity also leads to more insect pests, increasing the need for pesticides. Moreover, as corn is increasingly grown in dry pockets of the Midwest such as Kansas and Nebraska, it requires ever-larger quantities of irrigation water. Finally, the whole system relies heavily on fossil fuels to run tilling, planting, spraying, and harvesting equipment.

No wonder that whether we look at resource reliance (including use of commercial fertilizers and chemical pesticides, irrigation, and fuel use) or, conversely, implementation of more sustainable practices (reduced tillage, cover crops, and organic practices, among others), most Midwest states once again lag.

RANKINGS BY RESOURCE RELIANCE

RANKINGS BY USE OF CONSERVATION PRACTICES

But Midwestern farmers want to change the map.

To sum up: In general, the Midwest is using up a variety of limited resources and farming in ways that degrade its soil and water, while falling far short of producing the variety of foods we need for healthy diets. Not a great system. But there are hopeful signs that the region may be starting to change course.

For example, in Iowa, more and more farmers are expanding their crop rotations to add oats or other small grains, which research has shown aids in regenerating soils, improving soil health, and delivering clean water, while also increasing productivity and maintaining profits. Diversifying crops in the field can also help to diversify our food supply and improve nutrition.

Back in my alma mater state of Indiana, farmers planted 970,000 acres of cover crops in 2017—making these soil protectors the third-most planted crop in the state. And in a surprising turn of events just last week, Ohio’s Republican governor signed an executive order that will require farmers in eight Northwest Ohio watersheds to take steps to curb runoff that contributes to a recurring problem of toxic algae in Lake Erie that hurts recreation and poisons Toledo’s drinking water.

A recent UCS poll provides additional evidence that farmers across the region are looking for change. Earlier this year, we asked more than 2,800 farmers across the partisan divide in seven states (Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) about federal farm policies that today incentivize the Midwest agricultural status quo. Nearly three-quarters of respondents indicated they are looking for a farm bill that prioritizes soil and water conservation, while 69 percent supported policies (like farm-to-school supports) that help farmers grow more real food for local consumption. More than 70 percent even said they’d be more likely to back a candidate for public office who favors such priorities.

Speaking of the farm bill, things are coming to a head in Congress this summer over that $1 trillion legislative package that affects all aspects of our food system. As the clock ticks toward a September 30 deadline, the shape of the next farm bill is in question, with drastically different proposals passed by the House and the Senate. Critically important programs—including investments that could help farmers in the Midwest and elsewhere produce more healthy food and farm more sustainably—are at risk.

This article originally appeared on the Union of Concerned Scientists blog, and is reprinted with permission.

Iowa farm photo CC-licensed by Don Graham