Some folks are looking hard for more dirt on Gov. Terry Branstad’s administration.

I’m just looking for some in my yard.

Nearly seven years ago, we moved from an older neighborhood in Ames to our newish, late ’90s subdivision on the north side of Marion. When the first spring in our new digs arrived, we set out to do some landscaping, flower beds, bushes, etc.

What we found out fast was that our sod was sitting on thick, compacted clay subsoil. Whatever topsoil had existed before this cornfield became a housing development was pretty much gone. It was an unpleasant surprise. I later learned that builders often strip the topsoil to make it easier to use heavy equipment on a worksite and speed up building. And in many cases, they don’t put much, or any, of it back. Sometimes, the topsoil is sold.

Now, whenever I plant anything in our yard, in fertile Iowa, for Pete’s sake, I have to buy dirt in a bag from a store. And having any decent grass means dumping a bunch of chemicals on my lawn. This is not an unusual story in the sprawling subdivisions of suburban Iowa.

“Most subsoils in Iowa are clay-based. The permeability is low to begin with,” said Joe Griffin, who leads the wastewater permitting program for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. “And then run over it a few times with large equipment, that does not increase the permeability. When they’re done building the lots, they put a layer of sod on, which has a layer of topsoil on it. But it’s a small layer, three-quarters of an inch to an inch.”

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The Five Farms documentary followed five families over the course of a yearlong cycle of seasons in order to help people make the connection between the food on their tables, the farmers who work to produce it, and the value of the farmland they care for.

The Griffieon Family Farm, north of Ankeny, was one of five farms from across the country selected to participate in the documentary. When asked to summarize why she wanted to participate in the documentary, LaVon Griffieon said “Basically, to educate Americans about where their food comes from and the security of local food production. A community that hasn’t preserved enough farmland to feed itself is NOT sustainable.”

Visit the Five Farms  website to find out more about the project, read stories from the families, listen to the radio features and learn what it takes farm and produce the food we depend on.

Scott County plans to be the first metro-area country to try a new tool for preserving farmland for good.

by David Peterson, Star Tribune

November 2, 2010

Joe Adams just hates the fact that his postal address is Shakopee.

Shakopee, to him, is the “Army barracks” he sees lining Hwy. 169 – unadorned townhome complexes that he’s convinced will be slums in 20 years, if not before.

His own spread many miles south of that city, with its 17 types of culinary herbs and its brilliantly colored rows of native-prairie wildflowers and its child visitors chasing frogs near a lake with trumpeter swans? Not Shakopee.

Yet a new approach to saving swatches of Scott County’s farmland from the slow march of suburbs across the countryside could bring those two worlds into either a closer embrace – or a collision.

Scott is moving toward becoming the first metro-area county to adopt a strategy associated mainly with densely settled East Coast states: A trading system for building rights.

Called Transfer of Development Rights, or TDR for short, the system aims to compensate farmers for the money they give up by not selling prime farmland to developers. In exchange, a developer gets the right to squeeze in extra housing units someplace else.

“It’s an ingenious idea that has been tried in hundreds of places around the country,” said Armando Carbonell, senior fellow at the Cambridge, Mass.-based Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “It has worked extremely well for some – and for some not at all.”That became apparent last week to a roomful of Scott County folks gathered in New Prague to hear about the experiences of three Minnesota counties that have tried it.

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