CLARINDA, Iowa (KMTV) —
- Video shows an Iowa farm with sheep, cattle and even a donkey.
- Clarinda-area farmer, Seth Watkins sat at his dining room table and explained his passion for regenerative agriculture and its benefits.
- Watkins worked with Golden Hills RC&D to bring a Canadian conservation program to Southwest Iowa. It's called ALUS and southwest Iowa is the first place to get it.
- LEARN MORE: goldenhillsrcd.org
- ALUS Canada: alus.ca
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
Seth Watkins is a fourth-generation Iowa farmer and he’s passionate about making farmland sustainable and healthy for future generations.
SETH: “I really love the land.”
I’m your southwest Iowa neighborhood reporter, Katrina Markel, and I visited Seth on his farm near Clarinda ... where he’s working with Golden Hills RC&D on a new program called ALUS: that stands for Alternative Land Use Services. Its focus? Regenerative agriculture.
SETH: “Those marginal lands are the ones that are most fragile. And, you know, you can see the benefit to restoring them to what maybe they were intended to be. You know, all of this was prairie once ... to be able to put some prairie back on marginal land and even have the technical support to figure out what kind of trees I should plant with it.”
ALUS started in Canada. Cara Morgan is the executive director of Golden Hills RC&D. They got funding from Iowa West Foundation and the Walton Foundation to launch a first-in-the-nation pilot program in southwest Iowa.
CARA: “We don’t want to take your high productive lands out of production ... it’s about looking at the marginal lands that don’t make as much money or that you have more inputs that you have revenue coming off of -- and putting them back to what they were originally intended.”
One example: native grasses on the margins of cropland help retain water and reduce pollution.
In Part 2. I’ll take a deeper look at the ALUS program and the Watkins ag operation.
In Clarinda, I'm your southwest Iowa neighborhood reporter Katrina Markel
