Heartland

Thomas Fawcett

Farmers face many challenges in their operations as they work to balance financial, agronomic, and environmental stewardship. Despite this difficult pursuit farmers are often painted as the villains of the environmental and water quality problems. This opposition between conservation and agriculture has caused a division pushing the solutions further and further out of reach. Heartland Co-op understands, along with farmers, that this land and water is simply being borrowed from our future generations. Many farmers are reaching out for opportunities to increase the viability and sustainability of their operations both economically and environmentally, and Heartland Co-op is answering those calls with a new approach to conservation agriculture.

Heartland Co-op has always been on the leading edge of conservation in the ag-retail space, and this history goes back to the 1990’s. These advancements in conservation range from implementing grid soil sampling and variable rate lime and fertilizer application, to helping develop the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy, to various other conservation minded partnerships. This rich history has led to the launch of Heartland Co-op’s Conservation Department in 2020 with its sole purpose of bringing conservation to its farmers across the Midwest.

Heartland Co-op is unique in the conservation space because of its Farmer Focused Conservation Sales Model. This model is geared towards helping farmers reduce soil loss and reduce nutrient loss in their fields to increase productivity and longevity of their operations. In order to reduce soil and nutrient loss, Heartland Co-op presents conservation farming as a spectrum of farming practices from low investment, low reward, to high investment, high reward. Nearly all farmers across the Midwest find themselves on this spectrum and do not realize the contribution they are already making towards improving the environment.

This spectrum ranges from nitrogen stabilizers and variable rate fertilizer on the low end, to cover crops and no till in the middle, and all the way to taking targeted acres out of production for a wetland on the high end. This ideology around conservation allows farmers to employ a variety of practices across their acres to maximize agricultural output and conservation improvement. Specifically, Heartland Co-op’s Conservation Department targets the poorest performing and most environmentally sensitive acres. This approach allows for the least amount of land to be taken out of production, while having the largest impact on the landscape moving forward. This different outlook on conservation openly displays the options available to farmers to improve the environment and their business, and not just as a vague claim of “it’s the right thing to do”.

Because of this lack of awareness of conservation practices, Heartland has instituted a sales approach that is nearly identical to the standard sales agronomist or crop specialist’s pitch to improve the productivity of an operation. This approach uses dedicated Conservation Agronomists to help tailor conservation solutions to a farmer’s operation to ensure productivity and profitability for years to come while accessing available funding to alleviate as much financial burden as possible. Through deliverables, expectations, marketing, and outreach, Heartland Co-op has turned conservation into an active part of everyday agriculture, rather than a passive afterthought. We set conservation deliverables for ourselves the way a sales agronomist sets sales goals. Through this structure, Heartland’s Conservation Team has positioned 62,035 acres of cover crops, 2,300 acres of no-till/strip-till adoption, 2,240 acres of improved nutrient management, 147 acres of prairie restoration, 124 saturated buffers or bioreactors, three ponds, and one wetland over the last two and half years.

This innovation in the conservation space has created huge demand for the Heartland Co-op Conservation Department both from the growers they serve, but also in collaborations with public agencies and private industries. These public-private partnerships are groundbreaking in creating a space where partners with different perspectives on agriculture can come together to achieve common goals. The Practical Farmers of Iowa Cover Crop Cost Share Program, the Central Iowa Cover Crop Partnership, and the Lower Cedar Watershed Management Plan are three primary public/ private partnerships Heartland Co-op is a part of. These partnerships create unique opportunities for farmers to implement conservation through first of its kind services, and extensive funding dedicated to these practices.

With a commitment to serving Midwest farmers, Heartland Co-op’s Conservation Department has two goals: 1) We will continue to be an instrumental part of farming operations to maximize productivity, profitability, and longevity to keep farming a generational labor of love and 2) We will bring upstream and downstream environmental stakeholders to the table with farmers to create long-lasting and truly effective partnerships that focus on real conservation deliverables instead of continued inaction through division