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Perennial Progression Slidewhow Based on Imagery from Researchers Larsen, Schulte & Tyndal from Iowa State University
- 1. The Iowa landscape is dominated by row crops, especially corn Larsen, Schulte & Tyndall 2% Perennial cover
- 2. Larsen, Schulte & Tyndall 4% Perennial cover Small targeted changes can have big benefits for water quality
- 3. Larsen, Schulte & Tyndall 8% Perennial cover As perennial cover reaches 10%, reductions in erosion and water pollution can exceed 80%
- 4. Larsen, Schulte & Tyndall 16% Perennial cover Opportunities for new uses grow as biomass production scales up
- 5. 32% Perennial cover Larsen, Schulte & Tyndall Almost half of Iowa’s corn is used for ethanol, replacing it with perennials has many benefits
- 6. Larsen, Schulte & Tyndall 64% Perennial cover Perennials can also feed livestock, and someday soon grain crops
Editor's Notes
- But it doesn’t need to happen overnight, right? So we can move incrementally… from 2% perennial cover, for example,
- To 4%, beginning to protecting waterways. And then from 4%
- To 8 %
- Then it is not too challenging to visualize even more perennials on the landscape – perhaps 16%
- 32%
- Or even more. Now what we’re looking at here is a complex agroecosystem that we would expect not only to provide perennials for bioenergy, but a variety of food, fibers, and ecosystem services (protect and improve soils, lead to cleaner waterways, reduce greenhouse gas emissions) There’s some really good news here, because the strong evidence that redesigning the landscape in this way (using agroecological principles) brings a wide range of benefits, which means that there are plenty of incentives to develop these types of systems – so such efforts do not need to be driven by the energy industry alone. These complex systems have been historically underfunded and understudied – which isn’t good in itself but indicates that there is likely a lot of untapped potential to improve them, including their yields but also the services they provide.