Greener Pastures: Decorah, Iowa

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Decorah's isolation has served it well, if you like unspoiled rural living. The nearest mall and airport are an hour away in LaCross, Wisconsin, while Rochester, Minnesota, is a good 90 minutes away and the Twin Cities are nearly a three-hour drive. Winneshiek County is blessedly out of development's path, since we aren't close enough to anywhere to commute easily, but we still see a number of McMansions beginning to dot the landscape.

The dominant cultural and political scene in Decorah is relatively conservative, but mostly tolerant. The local crowd of green-minded citizens is vocal and vigorous—and growing. As an example, the Oneota Community Food Co-op has over 1,000 members—in a town that has only 10,000 residents when Luther College, the local private liberal arts school, is in session. Things occasionally get rancorous, and people start calling each other names, as they did during the zoning fight over the new Super Wal-Mart, but for the most part people get along.

We bought land for our organic vegetable farm 17 miles from town because land closer in simply cost more than we could afford. The isolation is nice, but occasionally inconvenient, especially as the children grow older. Our 82-acre plot of fields, pasture and forest was a decent find in 1999: We paid $110.000 for a farm with a falling-down-but-serviceable barn and an "unlivable" house we made livable with just a little time and money.

Throughout Northeast Iowa, the organic farming and gardening community is thriving. The rolling landscape largely precludes mega-farms, and many of the remaining small farmers—and some of the large ones—have the means and the motivation to go organic. The result has been the development of marketing and support networks for organic grain and livestock products, which in turn feed the growth of organic production. For organic vegetable production at this scale to provide a decent living, however, potential producers need to plan to travel to find an adequate market for their goods. Decorah is also home to the vegetable seed preservation organization, the Seed Savers Exchange.

Unfortunately all is not rosy with the farming scene in the area. Like everywhere else in the country, the agricultural economy here is in a serious depression. The same economic pressures that have some producers looking into organics have other producers looking into chemical-intensive, genetically modified crops or expanding hog confinement facilities, both of which are becoming increasingly common features of the Northeast Iowa landscape.

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