AMES, Iowa — A website with examples of how Iowa and the country benefit from teaching, research and extension efforts at Iowa State University and the other nation’s land grant universities has been launched.
“The Land-Grant Impacts website is a new tool that will better inform the American people and the international community of the significant agricultural research, education and extension impacts taking place at land grant universities across our nation, which offer practical solutions to today’s critical societal challenges. This website will help policy makers and the public learn more about this work that is partially supported with NIFA funding,” said Sonny Ramaswamy, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).
The website at http://landgrantimpacts.tamu.edu highlights results and impact of research and extension education programming. Information includes contacts for university research and extension projects and updates on funding, project implementation or education impact.
Impact statements are categorized in six areas: Food Security; Nutrition and Health; Youth, Family and Communities; Environmental Stewardship; Agricultural Systems; and Energy and Bioproducts.
The website also informs users about the history of the land grant university system and how its mission has evolved since the systems’ founding. Iowa State, like all land grant universities, has a three-fold mission of teaching, research and extension.
“The college’s research in agriculture and life sciences is the basis for solving complex, local to global challenges,” said Joe Colletti, senior associate dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Iowa State. “It’s a key part of how we are engaged in learning, discovery, translation and service for the benefit of Iowa and the world.
Iowa State’s agricultural programs were ranked fifth among the world’s universities in the latest annual ranking by a British organization that rates higher education. Its College of Agriculture and Life Sciences educates students, its Experiment Station funds research, while ISU Extension and Outreach provides science-based information to the public.
Iowa State’s impacts include:
- A research project demonstrating that planting strips of prairie plants on as little as 10 percent of land in crop fields reduced erosion and kept nutrients in the soil while increasing the biodiversity of the farmland. Compared with fields planted to corn and soybeans using no-till, the fields with prairie strips reduced soil sediment movement, phosphorus transport, total nitrogen transport surface water flow.
- Iowa youth benefited when their parents participated in ISU Extension and Outreach sequential parenting programs. The moms and dads who attended these research-based programs improved one or more critical parenting practices, such as regularly reading to young children and improving communications with young teens. The children were more successful in school and the community benefited. For every dollar spent on the Strengthening Families Program 10-14, $9.60 is saved by reducing substance abuse and other youth risky behaviors.
ISU is one of the 238 public research universities, land grant institutions, state university systems and affiliated organizations represented by The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. The land grant university system has affiliations in all 50 states, the four U.S. territories, the District of Columbia, Mexico and Canada.
Iowa State was founded in 1858 and opened as a result of the Morrill Act, which granted each state funding to charter a university with the purpose of teaching agriculture, military tactics and the mechanical arts as well as classical studies to help members of the working class obtain a practical education.