Iowa: Agriculture and the Tallgrass Prairie

Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring

Zack Williams

Outdoors, Wilderness, Sports, Fishing, Outdoor, Hunting, Sports & Recreation

4.6 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2025

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

“At first the Euroamerican settlers could not fathom the tallgrass prairie.
Stepping into it from cropland-speckled woodlands to the east, they entered
a land of sky and horizon, wind and light, flower and scent, a surging sea of
grasses that staggered the imagination. The prairie grasslands seemed to
stretch on forever, a landscape that promised no enclosure, only intensity
and exposure…”

So writes Cornelia (Connie) Mutel in her book, The Emerald Horizon: The
History of Nature in Iowa, a modern classic of natural history. Mutel has spent
her life chronicling the fantastic and beleaguered landscape of her home
state, and the place that she knows and loves like no other. Her life’s work-
seven books written or edited, all on different aspects of Iowa’s natural
history- could be viewed as a requiem: only 0.1% of the native tallgrass
prairies remain in Iowa, over 97% of its’ once wildly biodiverse landscapes
have been converted to human use, agricultural runoff and toxic spills have
poisoned over half of the state’s waterways and thousands of its residents’
wells, the draining of wetlands causes massive, budget-breaking floods,
topsoil loss is at crisis level. The current model of Iowa’s agriculture does not
work for anyone, and there seems to be no political will to change it.

But Connie Mutel, a writer steeped in the understanding of time, nature, and
change, does not believe in requiems. We discuss her latest and perhaps
most important work, Tending Iowa’s Land: Pathways to a Sustainable
Future, where she brings together a diverse selection of expert voices from
across Iowa, all focused on the very possible and very practical goal of fixing
that which is broken, and restoring the miracle that is Iowa.

---

The Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring is brought you by Backcountry Hunters & Anglers and presented by Silencer Central, with additional support from Decked, Dometic, and Filson.

Join Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, the voice for your wild public lands, waters, and wildlife to be part of a passionate community of hunter-angler-conservationists.

BHA. THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS AND WILDLIFE.

Web: https://www.backcountryhunters.org

Instagram: @backcountryhunters

Facebook: @backcountryhunters

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Just the compaction of the soils through tillage has created a kind of a hydrophobic,
0:10.8	where the water runs off instead of going into salt.
0:14.6	So of course it's going to flood.
0:16.6	Short carbon dioxide, short water, string them together with oxygen and you get these long
0:23.8	hydrocarbons which were then shunted down into the roots of the prairie plants and formed these
0:30.5	dense, deep mats going down 20 feet, sometimes deeper than 20 feet down. So the vast majority of the organic matter was below soil.
0:42.2	A lot of these problems, they're such so overwhelming. You say, how could that ever happen? And what I
0:49.3	always say is it has to happen. Things will get worse and worse until the point that it has to be done.
0:56.9	And one of my favorite phrases is, the sooner we act, the more we have to save.
1:03.0	Hey, everybody, it's Hal Herring, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers Podcast and Blast.
1:08.0	Thanks for being here.
1:09.7	Hey, I am proud to announce we have a new sponsor for our
1:13.2	podcast and that is silencer central. If you are involved in hunting and shooting or both,
1:21.4	you are probably looking at owning or dreaming of owning a silencer suppressor, the same thing for your firearm.
1:30.4	I've got my first one a couple years ago.
1:33.2	It's been a complete game changer for me.
1:35.9	I'm just looking at another one right now for another rifle.
1:39.8	I will never go back to where I was.
1:44.4	So one of the things, Silencer Central is, has been around since 2005, founded as South Dakota Silencer.
1:55.1	And it is simply the easiest way to get a suppressor right now. It is America's number one silencer dealer.
2:05.7	They can walk you through the whole process and have a suppressor delivered directly to your door.
2:12.6	If you've ever looked at this process, if you ever would, and for me me I had a lot of research that I had to do
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 13 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Zack Williams, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Zack Williams and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.