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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Seedy business: A sustainable-ag champion gets plowed under at Iowa State
  • Date: Wed, 02 Nov 2005 21:36:21 -0700

Seedy Business at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/11/1/193245/785


Seedy business: A sustainable-ag champion gets plowed under at Iowa State


Posted by Tom Philpott <http://gristmill.grist.org/user/Tom%20Philpott> at
8:13 AM on 02 Nov 2005


Plunked down in the land of huge, chemical-addicted grain farms and the
nation's greatest concentration of hog feedlots, Iowa State University's
Leopold Center for Sustainable <http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/>
Agriculture has always had a tough row to hoe.

Imagine trying to operate an Anti-Cronyism League from Bush's West Wing, and
you get an idea of what the Leopold Center is up against. Industrial
agriculture runs the show in Iowa, sustained by regular infusions of federal
cash and its government-sanctioned ability to "externalize" the messes it
creates. The state grabbed
<http://www.ewg.org/farm/progdetail.php?fips=19000&progcode=total&page=state
s> $12.5 billion in federal agriculture subsidies between 1995 and 2004 --
second only to Bush's own home state. Iowa leads all states in hog
production: It churned out 14.5 million pigs in 2001 alone, the vast
majority from stuffed, environmentally and socially ruinous CAFOs
(confined-animal feeding operations).

Yet since springing to life in 1987 by fiat of the Iowa legislature --
funded ingeniously by state taxes on nitrogen fertilizer and pesticide --
the Leopold Center has become an invaluable national resource for critics of
industrial agriculture and seekers of new alternatives.

Now, however, a sudden purge at the top has called the Center's much-prized
independence from industrial agriculture into question.

The Leopold Center operates under the authority of Iowa State University's
College of Agriculture. Last Friday, the college issued a press
<http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/news/newsreleases/2005/kirschenmann_102805.h
tm> release announcing that the Leopold Center's director of five years,
Fred Kirschenmann, had "accepted a new leadership role as a distinguished
fellow of the center."

The college went on to state that it had named an interim director,
effective Nov. 1.

Kirschenmann himself, however, tells a more interesting tale than what's
contained in the press release's bland prose. He says his move from director
to "distinguished fellow" came suddenly and without his own input.

"On Wednesday [Oct. 26] I received a letter from the interim dean asking me
to resign by Friday and decide by then if I would accept the position of
distinguished fellow at the center," Kirschenmann told me yesterday.

"I wrote her [the interim dean] back telling her I thought she was moving
too fast, that there wouldn't be time for a smooth transition. She wrote
back that it was a done deal -- she had already named a new director."

Kirschenmann says the interim dean, Wendy Wintersteen, had been on Leopold's
advisory board for years and had served on the search committee that hired
him in 2000. "She was always very supportive of what we were doing,"
Kirschenmann says. "Until about two years ago. Then she became very
critical."

Her critique centered on the idea that in its work the Leopold Center was
neglecting "key stakeholders," Kirschenmann adds. "But she never really
clarified who those stakeholders were."

Might she have been referring to agribusiness interests? "You can draw your
own conclusions," Kirschenmann says. She never cited any reason for the de
facto purge, save for "some verbiage about how I would be free to pursue my
own work without having to worry about administrative duties."

To be sure, Iowa State's College of Agriculture draws agribusiness cash the
way a penned-up pig wallowing in its own waste draws flies. I have a call
into the college for a list of corporate donors; until that call is
returned, let it suffice that this
<http://www.ag.iastate.edu/aginfo/news/2005releases/ipstudy.html> is the
sort of research the college commonly proffers: A study claiming to show
that the genetically modified seed industry deserves a greater "level of
intellectual property protection ... than what existed in the North American
seed corn market in the late 1990s." Collaborators: a pair of scientists
from GM seed titan Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc., a subsidiary of
DuPont.

Here <http://www.foundation.iastate.edu/corp/stories.html> are glowing
testimonials from two of the college's "partners": John Deere and Cargill.

Kirschenmann says he accepted the "distinguished fellow" position because
Wintersteen assured him he could continue doing his own work on sustainable
agriculture. And that work is important. Under Kirschenmann the Leopold
Center bluntly criticized and rigorously documented the environmental and
social calamities being wrought by industrial agriculture.

Will he continue to be able to do that work at Leopold? "We'll see how it
goes," he told me.

In the meantime, I'll be doing some research about which corporations and
commodity groups give what to Iowa State's College of Agriculture.




  • [Livingontheland] Seedy business: A sustainable-ag champion gets plowed under at Iowa State, Tradingpost, 11/02/2005

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