SILT hosting SW IA events

The Sustainable Iowa Land Trust, or SILT, is hosting multiple events this week to spread the word to Iowa landowners about what the organization can do for them.
The organization started with an initial concept meeting in 2015, and was officially founded in 2016. Maggie McQuown, owner of Resilient Farms also serves as Vice-President of the SILT Board. McQuown said the organization was founded due to a concern about the amount of Iowa farmland that was getting lost to development or getting sold.
“Population is aging, so there’s a great deal of turnover in farmland recently and oftentimes the land kind of just gets auctioned off to the highest bidder, especially around urban areas or towns, for development. A group of people who are very conservation minded and believe in Iowa’s farm legacy felt like we should be protecting more of Iowa’s farmland from that fate,” said McQuown. “The mission of SILT is primarily to protect Iowa farmland from development and preserve farm and family legacy by providing methods to assure that the land will remain in farming for future generations. The vision is that we would have Iowa be sustained by healthy farms integrated socially, economically, and ecologically with their communities. We’re trying to tie the heritage of our Iowa farms to communities more closely, as a lot of the urban areas have become larger.”
McQuown said there are people who have never been directly connected to farming and farmland, and there are people who do have a family legacy, but they’re separated from it. Additionally, Iowa imports nearly 90% of the food that is consumed in the state, so SILT would like to see more food grown and made available locally to Iowans. With so many of the farms that SILT protects, there’s a focus on trying to help younger, beginning farmers, underserved farmers, or people interested in just growing more food crops as opposed to corn and soybeans.
McQuown said she became involved with SILT around 2018, after meeting the founder and first executive director.
“I was considering what should happen to my farm in the long run. I was considering protecting it with some kind of a conservation easement. I was researching that, and that’s how I met the people from SILT because I had read about SILT’s mission. I met and talked with them about what SILT does and I believed it was a very worthwhile mission to try to save farmland. I joined the board of SILT in 2021,” stated McQuown.
Since its inception, SILT is responsible for protecting 16 farms and roughly 1,200 acres of land.
“In addition to those farms, we have several other farms in the pipeline. Deciding to put a permanent conservation easement or put your land into a reserved life estate is a major decision, and any estate planning decision often takes two to three years to get an easement or reserved life estate finalized. We continually have a lot of prospective farms and we carefully review the farm and the owners to make sure that this is a farm that SILT can protect and SILT has the responsibility to hold the easement and monitor it annually to assure that the farm is staying and using the practices in the easement guidelines. It’s a long-term relationship we build with these landowners and there are several steps involved in working through all the terms and doing the proper assessments and paperwork to put them in place.
This week, SILT is holding multiple events to spread the word about the organization and its mission. The first local event will take place tomorrow during Food 4 Thought from noon to 1 p.m. at the Carter Education Room at Montgomery County Memorial Hospital, 2301 Eastern Ave.
“Food for Thought is Larry Branstetter’s brainchild, and I love the idea of just bringing forth during this one hour session an opportunity to learn about topics that are of interest or important to the future of communities. Larry asked SILT executive director Breanna Horsey to kick off the fall sessions of Food for Thought. We’re trying to gain more awareness for SILT in Southwest Iowa and have more conservation-minded people to know us, to just making those that don’t know about us aware of SILT, and aware of what we do,” commented McQuown. “This is a good opportunity to share that. We’re trying to reach out to people  and get some professionals involved in the estate planning and financial advising process because as I said, many farmers and landowners are aging and they’re trying to figure out what to do with their farm in the future, especially those that may not have blood heirs who are directly interested in farming the land or don’t have any heirs at all, but yet they’re wanting to preserve their farm as a working farm and preserve the legacy they’ve built.”
On Friday, Horsey will be joining a Practical Farmers of Iowa field day from 10 a.m. to noon hosted by Leslie and Dave Carbaugh at their farm at 2575 D Ave., Red Oak.
“We partner with Practical Farmers a lot a lot because we have many of the similar interests and similar group of people, farmland owners and conservation-minded people that support our groups. We’re tag-teaming with Practical Farmers. The field day will have a focus on all the different programs and resources available to help people either with conservation practices or planning for the future of their farm. It fits very well with SILT’s involvement. I’m also on Montgomery County Soil and Water Conservation District as an assistant commissioner, so I work a lot with Dave since he’s a commissioner and we’re trying to help compile a whole roster list of various ways people can access programs and get help beyond the USDA and NRCS. Those include Practical Farmers and SILT and a whole range of people. We’ll have a list of all those different resources available for people at the field day,” McQuown said.
R.S.V.Ps are requested, but not required, to info@SILT.org. A meal will be provided. Even though the event will take place in a couple of days, McQuown said they’ll have space, as they never turn anyone away.
“Including these two events in Red Oak, we’re doing five different events in three days for SILT throughout Southwest Iowa. We really want to build awareness because the majority of SILT’s activity has tended to be from Des Moines and east in the state. We do have two farms in western Iowa, and one in Honey Creek, and another one further north that are protected by SILT, but that’s only two out of 12. There’s a lot of interest in food farming, and in this part of state around Council Bluffs there are a lot of farms that are being threatened by development, so we really want to connect with landowners and get people involved and advising people on estate planning.”
McQuown said they also want to gain insights from the landowners around the area as to what they see as the challenges because a big one is affordability of land and the benefit of a conservation easement.
“People say is this a benefit, but it reduces the value of the land on the open commercial market because the use of the land is somewhat restricted. It’s restricted to being used for sustainable farming practices, but there’s a great opportunity right now with that USDA/NRCS program called the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program Agricultural Land Easement ACEP ALE. SILT is a partner with NRCS on that. We can help put conservation easements on the land through NRCS and with that program the farmers will receive 50% of the reduced value of the land in money back to them that hasn’t been available before,” McQuown commented. “For a lot of landowners that didn’t want to take that financial hit, this helps compensate them for restricting the land and assuring it will stay as working farmland in perpetuity. It’s a really unique opportunity that hasn’t existed prior to 2023.”
McQuown said SILT is a nonprofit that has supporters and to be a part of SILT, you don’t have to be a landowner yourself.
“They can just be very passionate about conservation, the environment, local foods, or just love Iowa. Iowa is beautiful place to live with wide open spaces and we want to see that preserved. Once farmland is taken out of agriculture and developed, It can never be gotten back. We’re losing farmland everywhere in Iowa at a very rapid rate and it will never return to being farmland,” said McQuown.
SILT will accept anyone as a supporter and operates on donations. People can go to Silt.org for online donation opportunities, with several different ways to donate. Any kind of donation helps the organization to protect land, and if they want to find out more information about SILT, a person can go to that same web address. McQuown also gave a special mention to SILT’s executive director, Breanna Horsey
“She’s our second executive director taking what we do to the next level, SILT 2.0. She’s really a bright, ambitious, wonderful person, and if people can attend any of these events, they’ll be glad to meet her and have a chance to interact with her.”
Other events that will allow people to learn about SILT and protecting Iowa farmland will take place:
• From 8 to 9 a.m. Sept. 9 at the ISU Extension Office in Harrison County, 304 E. 7th St., Logan.
• From 8 to 9 a.m. Sept. 10 at the Golden Hills RC&D, 712 South Highway St., Oakland.
• From 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Sept. 10 at the Full Fledged Brewing Company, 40 Arena Way, Ste. 2, Council Bluffs. Parking is at the back of the building, off Bass Pro Drive.