Where our project is located

We will be conducting interviews in six states in 2020-2021: Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Two counties have been selected in each of these states. We’ll start our interviews in Wisconsin and Nebraska. In Wisconsin, we’ve selected Vernon and Dodge Counties. In Nebraska, we’ll focus on Seward and Hall Counties. We’ll move onto Minnesota and Iowa next, followed by Kansas and Illinois.

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This project focuses on two types of farming communities: 

  • Those that are more focused on more conventional production, including growing crops such as corn, soybeans, alfalfa, byproducts such as milk, and growing out poultry and livestock to sell to commodity markets; and

  • Those that are more focused on regenerative production, including growing vegetables, fruits, grass-fed beef or dairy, and other products such as maple syrup and honey. These products may be processed locally or sold at farmers markets, CSAs or to restaurants.

Clearly there are more than one type of farming community. Some rural counties practice both kinds or a continuum of production. In our effort to better determine what effects agricultural production may have on community health and the environment, we developed an index to summarize what kind of production our study counties gravitate toward.

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As described on or Methods page, we used data available from the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Survey collected as part of the Agricultural Census in 2017. We created a numeric formula, or index, that allowed us to place each of the states’ counties along a continuum from more conventional to more regenerative. 

We also reviewed the history of each of the counties to learn how it got to where it is today. We also relied on our local experts. With each of the six state coordinators , we made a final selection of which counties we wanted to focus on. This will allow us to make comparisons between the counties within each state and between the states.

We’re interviewing about 30 people in each county. After the data are collected, we will analyze them and write up the results. We plan to re-visit each of the study counties to share what we learned. Undoubtedly, the results will be very interesting and we would like to show them to communities that are being so kind as to share their perspectives with us.

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