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CARD: Center for Agricultural and Rural Development

Resource and Environmental Policy

Faculty and researchers in Resource and Environmental Policy assess regional, national, and international policies affecting the environment. Research analysis focuses on the environmental impacts of U.S. agricultural policies, including U.S. farm bill legislation.

Highlights

CARD Gets Grants from U.S. EPA to Evaluate Water Quality Trading
Art Spratlin, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 7 (center left), shakes hands with Gerald Miller, ISU College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, after an announcement of $600,000 in grant funding to CARD-ISU from the EPA to evaluate land conservation practices and the effects on three Iowa watersheds. Philip Gassman, CARD (right of Miller), and Richard Leopold, Iowa Department of Natural Resources (left of Spratlin), were on hand for the announcement at Raccoon River Park in Des Moines on April 1. -More-

group photo

The Economic Value of Iowa's Natural Resources
Daniel Otto, Dan Monchuk, Kanlaya Jintanakul, and Catherine Kling
Department of Economics, ISU Extension, Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, College of Agriculture, and Iowa State University
Commissioned by the Sustainable Funding for Natural Resources Study Committee, Iowa General Assembly
December, 2007

Conservation Practices in Iowa: Historical Investments, Water Quality, and Gaps
Catherine Kling, Sergey Rabotyagov, Manoj Jha, Hongli Feng, Josh Parcel, Philip Gassman, and Todd Campbell
A Report to the Farm Bureau, Iowa Corn Growers Association, Iowa Soybean Association, and Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, July 22, 2007
Report without Appendices (63 pages; 1.65 MB)
Report with Appendices (171 pages; 3.77 MB)

The Soil and Water Assessment Tool: Historical Development, Applications, and Future Research Directions (pdf)
P.W. Gassman, M.R. Reyes, C.H. Green, and J.G. Arnold
Invited Paper Series, Transactions of the ASABE, Vol. 50, Number 4

The Cost of Clean Water: Assessing Agricultural Pollution Reduction at the Watershed Scale
Silvia Secchi, Philip Gassman, Manoj Jha, Lyubov Kurkalova, Hongli Feng, Todd Campbell, and Catherine Kling
Report on research supported by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources
July 2005

The Iowa Lakes Valuation Project: Summary and Findings from Year One is the first report of a four-year economic study on the value that Iowans place on their water resources. The trip data collected in the first year was used to estimate total Iowa household trips to each of the 132 lakes included in the study. View more results and lake data at the Iowa Lakes Web Site.

Recent Papers

Hydrologic Simulations of the Maquoketa River Watershed Using SWAT
Manoj Jha
June 2009 [09-WP 492]

Agricultural Policy Environmental EXtender (APEX) Model: An Emerging Tool for Landscape and Watershed Environmental Analyses, The
Philip W. Gassman, Jimmy R. Williams, Xiuying Wang, Ali Saleh, Edward Osei, Larry M. Hauck, R. César Izaurralde, Joan D. Flowers
April 2009 [09-TR 49]

Recent Presentations

March 2008
Biofuels and Water Quality in the Midwest: Corn vs. Switchgrass (ppt) 4.21 MB
Silvia Secchi, Philip W. Gassman, Manoj Jha, Lyubov Kurkalova, and Catherine L. Kling
Presented at the Iowa Water Conference, Ames, Iowa (February 2008), and the Ecological Society of America Biofuels Conference, Washington, DC
February 2008
Least Cost Control of Agricultural Nutrient Contributions to Local Waters and the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone (ppt) 4.58 MB
Sergey Rabotyagov, Todd Campbell, Manoj Jha, Philip W. Gassman, Jeffrey Arnold, Lyubov Kurkalova, Silvia Secchi, Hongli Feng, and Catherine L. Kling
Department of Economics, Iowa State University