Curious Iowa: Why does Iowa’s landscape look the way it does today?

Looking at the past informs where we are now and the challenges we face. In this installment of Curious Iowa, a Gazette series that answers readers’ questions about our state and its culture, we look at parts of Iowa’s history to understand why its landscape looks how it does today.

This was a topic of discussion at the 2024 Iowa Ideas conference, which brought experts from across the state together last week in conversation about issues in Iowa. You can view a replay of that hour-long discussion at iowaideas.com/replays/2024.

To get a better understanding of Iowa’s environmental history, we spoke with historians and ecologists.

What did Iowa look like before European settlers arrived?

Dr. Tom Rosburg, a professor of ecology and botany at Drake University, has been identifying plants for 30 years. He told The Gazette that prior to the arrival of European settlers, the land that makes up the state of Iowa today was “a mosaic of ecosystems.” Using soil maps, original government land surveys, and ecological surveys of tracts of land today, we know that the land was made up of prairie, savanna, woodlands, forests and wetlands. And there were fewer trees in most places, Rosburg said.

“The native landscape was a tiny sponge, basically, with the native vegetation,” Rosburg said. “The wetlands ... would hold water and even the prairie soil would have held a lot more water in the soil ... because the prairie soil had probably twice as much organic matter than the agricultural soils of now, and the organic matter is a huge part of how soils hold onto water, keep that water in the soil, make it available for plants to use.”

Rosburg said that because Iowa’s soil was so rich, ecosystems were incredibly diverse and supported large numbers of wildlife.

“We still, of course, have a lot of wildlife. Some species are much more abundant now than there even were in 1850, but I don’t think people can really appreciate just how much of a diverse landscape with wildlife and bird and animal life Iowa would have been like,” Rosburg said.

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How did the land change after Iowa became a state?

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Change came with the arrival of European settlers in the early 1800s. Kevin Mason, associate professor of history at Waldorf University, said that looking at historic documents that detail what Iowa looked like in the 1820s and 1830s, like those of the Dragoons expeditions, it’s hard to wrap your mind around the incredible changes in Iowa’s landscape.

Iowa became a state in 1846 and we know from the Government Land Office’s original public land survey of Iowa, there was 23.3 million acres of prairie. Nineteen percent of land was made up of forests and wetlands, and prairie pothole marshes made up 11 percent. Water, flood plains and backwaters made up the remaining 5 percent.

In the 1850s, Iowa started losing about 2 percent of its native prairie each year, according to the Iowa DNR. By the 1930s, less than 30,000 acres of prairie remained.

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Kristine Nemec manages the Iowa roadside vegetation management program at the University of Northern Iowa Tallgrass Prairie Center. Nemec said that prairie plants are important in Iowa’s landscape because of their habitat value and the benefits their root systems provide.

Tallgrass prairie plant roots can be six to eight feet long. These plants hold the soil in place and reduce erosion.

“A lot of the benefit of those really deep, dense roots is water quality.” Nemec said. “The roots are great at adhering to nutrients, absorbing nutrients, reducing pollution, so that's a benefit we get, is the improved water quality.”

Mason said that over the course of the 1800s and 1900s, 98 percent of Iowa’s land surface was altered, whether that was for agriculture, roads or cities.

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“In a decade between 1850 and 1860, [the state is] moving from only about 800,000 acres of improved land to almost 303.8 million acres of improved land,” Mason said. “... in that 1850-1860 window, we’re going from 4,800 farms in the state to almost 62,000 farms by the time we get to 1860.”

Leo Landis, state curator at the State Historical Society of Iowa, said that the term “improved land’ is important because it shows favor for the cultivation of land.

“So it’s part of the cultural ethos that’s being built in our nation to say putting things into corn, wheat, oats, cultivated grasses, later clover and then alfalfa, is improved land... prairie’s not improved,” Landis said.

The cultivation of the land destroys natural habitat and negatively impacts wildlife. While the Endangered Species Act wasn’t passed until 1970s, Mason said that in the 1800s, as many as 38 species of animals would have fit into today’s “endangered” status.

Why did early Iowans drain the land?

According to Iowa State University, almost 25 percent of Iowa’s land was once in some form of wetland ecosystem. Removing excess water was necessary to make the land farmable. Marshy lands are not easy to farm. We see an example of this with Kossuth County and the appearance and disappearance of Iowa’s 100th county in the early 1850s. Until technology allowed wetlands to be drained, Kossuth County was not a desirable place to live.

The demand for draining, ditching and tiling lead to Mason City rising in prominence for making drain tiles and sewer pipe. Mason said the rhetoric during this time period is “warfare, that we’re going to battle to claim these lands... and bring them into this agricultural production system”.

Today, upwards of 95 percent of Iowa’s wetlands have been reduced.

“We dropped the water table in the state on average about four feet,” Mason said. “We straightened nearly 4,000 miles of streams and rivers across Iowa, and we changed things radically.”

Landis said that draining and tiling was critical to transportation.

“I had [a] transportation engineer tell me in the late 1990s, you can’t have good roads in Iowa without good drainage, without keeping the water away from the roadway... so it’s really critical to what our road system is like in the early 20th century too.” Landis said.

How did Iowa become a leader in corn and hogs?

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When we think of some of Iowa’s biggest agricultural products today, corn, soybeans and hogs come to mind. Just as the methods and tools used to farm change over time, so do the crops farmers focus on.

According to the Iowa Soybean Association, Iowa farmers rank second in soybean production in the U.S. But soybeans didn’t become a major crop until the 1930s and 1940s, Landis said.

Through the 1890s and early 1900s, wheat was Iowa’s major cash crop. Landis said the elevators developed in Iowa around the Civil War were built primarily for wheat. During this time, most people were growing wheat, oats, hay and corn.

Corn has a long agricultural history in the land that makes up our state. It originated in South and Central America and has significance for all of Iowa’s indigenous peoples in the pre-colonial era.

When Euro-American farmers arrived, Landis said they found “more intense ways” to farm corn. Mason said that in 1850, Iowa ranked 19th in corn production. By 1860, the state was ranked 7th.

As corn took off, it was profitable for farmers to also raise hogs because hogs eat corn. Mason said that by growing corn, a farmer can provide for an external commodity market, feed one’s livestock and provide for one’s family.

Today, Iowa ranks first in corn and hog production.

The 20th century exploded with new technology and research into things like the genetics of corn and pesticides. As technology improved, farms changed what they produced, how much they produced, and for what reasons.

For example, according to the Iowa Farm Bureau, over half of Iowa’s corn production today is used to make ethanol.

When did efforts to beautify roadways begin?

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Colorful prairie plants in roadside ditches may seem like a natural feature, but did you know there are concerted efforts to beautiful roadways?

First Lady Lady Bird Johnson was a major advocate for the beautification of roadsides in the 1960s. She said that “beautification” makes the concept sound cosmetic, but it actually means clean water, air, roadsides and preservation of landmarks and wilderness.

During the fuel crisis in the 1970s, the Iowa DOT looked at how to save money on fuel and on mowing roadside ditches, Nemec said. In the 1980s, Iowans became more concerned about groundwater quality, because it was standard for herbicides to be sprayed to manage weeds. All of these factors led to interest in planting native plants along the roadsides.

In 1988, the Iowa Legislature created the Living Roadway Trust Fund, which funded and supported counties and cities across the state who wanted to manage roadsides in a more sustainable, cost effective and strategic manner. This could be through the use of strategic mowing, strategic herbicide use, planting native plants to reduce erosion and providing habitat and beautifying the roadside, Nemec said.

According to the Iowa DOT, more than 50,000 acres of federal, state, county and city roadsides in Iowa have been planted with native grasses and wildflowers.

Could Iowa’s land be returned to how it used to look?

“It would be an economic upheaval to try to transform our state back to a more native looking landscape,” Landis said.

Although, there are remnant prairies that have never been plowed. Remnant prairie is precious because natural prairie is difficult, if not impossible, to recreate. There are efforts across the state to restore prairie, whether that’s through roadside planting, integrating prairie strips into existing cropland or returning cropland to prairie.

Nemec said that restoration ecology is not like restoring a classic car back into mint condition. She said replicating exactly what was here is impossible.

“When we restore ecosystems, we’re trying to capture some of those functions that we get from those ecosystems: the habitat, the water quality, the soil health... it’s a lot about balance.” Nemec said.

The loss of prairie impacts the wildlife that relies on that habitat. Nemec said by December, the decision will be made whether to list the monarch butterfly as endangered.

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“A lot of that is loss of habitat,” Nemec said. “We don’t have enough prairie maybe to support large herds of bison like we used to, but even smaller pieces of prairie can at least help pollinators, and a little bit larger pieces of prairie can help those declines in grassland birds.”

Mason said that we sometimes get locked into a mindset that Iowa has always been corn or it has always been prairie. He said studying history helps a person understand that the environment is constantly changing.

“The ways we use land is always changing, but we need to be good stewards as we continue forward and be committed to embracing those changes and thinking about future generations,” Mason said.

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Comments: bailey.cichon@thegazette.com