The Glaspell farm sits on 412 acres of rolling cropland in Howard County, Iowa, about eight miles northeast of Cresco and just south of the Minnesota line.
Until 2018, the farm was in a conventional corn-soybean rotation, with the standard suite of erosion-control practices: contour planting on the steeper slopes, a grassed waterway through the main drainage, and a thirty-foot filter strip along the creek.
In 2019 the farm's third-generation operator, Marlon Glaspell, signed an agreement with Iowa State University's Science-based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairie Strips program, known by the acronym STRIPS, to convert about ten percent of the farm to permanent native prairie.
The conversion took the form of twelve narrow strips, each between forty and sixty feet wide, distributed across the cropped fields along contours and at the lower ends of slopes where runoff concentrates.
The strips are seeded with a mix of about thirty-five native species, including big bluestem, Indian grass, side-oats grama, leadplant, prairie blazing star, butterfly milkweed, and pale purple coneflower. The seed cost was approximately 9,400 dollars and was partially offset by a federal Conservation Reserve Program enrollment.
Seven years on, the strips have established into recognisable prairie. They are not pristine remnant prairie, the kind preserved in a handful of pioneer cemeteries and railroad rights-of-way, but they are functional native vegetation, dominated by warm-season grasses with a respectable diversity of forbs.
The conservation case for prairie strips is well documented. A long-running ISU monitoring study has shown that converting ten percent of a row-cropped field to strategically placed prairie reduces sediment loss from the field by about ninety-five percent, nutrient runoff by between seventy and eighty-five percent depending on the nutrient, and provides substantial habitat benefit for grassland-dependent birds and pollinators.
The numbers are striking because the proportion of land removed from production is small. The crop yield on the remaining ninety percent of the field is not measurably affected, and in some studies has been marginally higher, possibly due to edge effects.
Glaspell himself does not talk about the strips primarily in terms of the published data. He talks about them in terms of what he sees when he drives the field road after a heavy rain.
Before 2019, he says, a two-inch storm would produce visible sheet flow off the steeper portions of the south field, carrying brown sediment into the creek. After 2019, with the strips established, the same storms produce significantly less visible runoff, and the water that does reach the creek is clearer.
He has not measured this rigorously, and he is careful to distinguish his impression from data. But he says the impression is consistent with what the monitoring would predict, and it has changed his thinking about the rest of the operation.
In 2024 he added cover crops across all of his soybean ground. In 2025 he reduced his fall tillage to a single shallow pass on about half the acres. In 2026 he is experimenting, on a single eighty-acre field, with relay-cropping cereal rye into standing corn.
He is not, he says, becoming an organic farmer. The farm still uses synthetic nitrogen, atrazine, and glyphosate. The strips, he says, are not a substitute for productive agriculture but a way of producing while losing less.
The neighbours' response has been mixed. Two adjoining farmers, both in their sixties, have made polite comments about the strips and continued their conventional rotations unchanged.
A third, younger neighbour, who took over his family farm in 2022, has begun planting his own prairie strips this spring on a twenty-acre field with persistent gully problems. He used Glaspell's seed mix and Glaspell's no-till drill.
The county Soil and Water Conservation District, which has been promoting the practice through field days and demonstration funding, reports that prairie-strip acreage in Howard County has grown from 22 acres in 2019 to 187 acres in 2026. The total cropland in the county is approximately 256,000 acres.
The pace, in other words, is slow. The acreage is small. The published evidence is robust and has been robust for fifteen years, and the conversion rate among the farmers who have heard of the practice remains in the low single digits.
Glaspell, asked about this, said that farmers are cautious by necessity and that the conversion will continue at the pace it continues at.
He walked along the eastern edge of one strip on a June morning, noting the prairie blazing star coming into bud and a clay-coloured sparrow calling from a switchgrass stem.
The bird, he said, had not been on the farm in 2018. He was not certain whether the bird had moved in because of the strips or whether it had always been there and he had only now learned to recognise the call.
