Introduction

Multilevel study

To that aim, Midwest Healthy Ag is conducting a multilevel study. In this case, we’re studying the effects of agriculture on environment and community health at two levels.

At the level of counties across the Midwest, we are conducting statistical analyses on USDA and Census data to explore the relationships various kinds of agricultural production—across a continuum of conventional and regenerative practices— share with environmental and health indices.

Mapping out such relationships can give us a bird’s-eye view of the lay of the agricultural landscape across the entirety of the Midwest from county to county.

Those are important data. However, we believe they do not represent the full picture.

Site visits

In the end, farming is conducted by people and farms and communities differ in profound ways in the combinations of their histories, local ecologies and economies, and ways of living. The second level of the study is to visit twelve of the counties across our six study states: Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

We are visiting counties at different ends of the agricultural index we’ve developed. One set of counties will be more on the more conventional end of production. The other set at the more regenerative end. We will conduct interviews with individual farmers about their on-farm practices and their observations about changes in the larger environment, health, and community life.

We will also be conducting focus group meetings with different groups in the community. Rural counties are much more than their agricultural productivity and the focus groups will help round out the picture of county life.

Due to the COVID pandemic, we are conducting these visits online as described on the About page.

Report back

Once preliminary analysis is completed, we will be returning to each study county to report back to the community our initial findings. We think it critical that the communities kind enough to participate in our study should be the first to harvest the fruits of these efforts. These reports may help map out the state of ag, environment, and community health as the counties make their own decisions about what a healthy ag future looks like.