DesMoinesRegister.com, August 30, 2009

Coon Rapids, Ia. — This city and the nearby Roswell and Elizabeth Garst farmstead on Saturday once again brought together Russian visitors and American hosts to discuss a new vision for feeding the world.

Fifty years ago, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev came here to visit Roswell Garst, a farmer and corn-seed salesman, in search of agricultural innovations to better feed the Russian people.

Saturday, with the white Garst farmhouse as a backdrop, heirs unveiled a plaque commemorating Khrushchev's 1959 visit and this month's listing of the Roswell and Elizabeth Garst Farmstead Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Russian visitors this time included Khrushchev's son, Sergei, and a delegation of about 30 government leaders and businessmen. About 25 members of the Garst family, spanning four generations, also were sprinkled among an audience of 150 people.

Besides celebrating the farm's past, speakers laid out plans to use the farm to make history again: The land itself is being preserved in a nonprofit trust and will be used as a demonstration site for conservation and sustainable land management.

And the day's keynote speaker, Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, used the farm site and occasion to challenge the U.S. and Russian governments to work together on a 50-year plan to breed perennial varieties of the world's main grain crops, which would better protect soil while feeding a growing world population, he said.

In 2004, the Garst heirs decided that the best way to protect the land they love would be to create Whiterock Conservancy. It will have 5,500 acres when completed and will be one of the largest conservation-land areas in the Midwest, according to Fred Kirschenmann, distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and president of the Whiterock Conservancy Board.

"It is a gift not only to Iowa, but to the world," he said.

Whiterock Conservancy comprises croplands, grazing lands and wild lands, he said. Its managers are experimenting with rotational grazing, native prairie plantings, cover crops, wetland management and other techniques to continue producing food while preventing soil degradation. What they learn while working the conservancy's diverse landscape could help create a new vision for agriculture around the world, he said.

Jackson thinks that vision should be rooted in perennial crops. Today, 80 percent of U.S. agricultural land produces annual crops, which must be planted every year, a process that contributes to soil erosion. Annual crops also typically require more fertilizer. Perennial crops develop deeper, more extensive root systems, which help prevent erosion and capture nitrogen that otherwise would contaminate water.

Behind Jackson, unfurled from a second-floor window of the farmhouse, a wall hanging showed current annual varieties of wheat with short, skinny roots, and perennial varieties with bushy, much longer roots.

A shift from 80 percent of agricultural land in annuals to 80 percent in perennials would help feed an expanding population, prevent soil erosion beyond natural replacement levels, manage nutrients and water more efficiently and reduce use of toxic chemicals, Jackson said.

A coalition called the Green Lands/Blue Waters Initiative is pushing the idea of perennializing the landscape of the Mississippi Basin, to lessen soil erosion and leaching of nitrogen, Jackson said. Iowa State University is a partner with the initiative, which presented its ideas to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack on Friday.

When Garst and Khrushchev met in 1959, it was only 15 years after the siege of Leningrad and the starvation deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, Jackson recalled. For all the differences between a Communist premier and a capitalist corn grower, both understood that "people will want to be fed," Jackson said. "Their question then is our question today: How do we help assure an adequate food supply, not just in our two countries, but around the world and for centuries to come?"

If Russia and the United States would collaborate to develop a more sustainable form of agriculture, perhaps an audience will gather in 2059 at the Garst farm to celebrate "the 50th anniversary of our effort to end deficit spending of ecological capital," he said.