At White Rock Conservancy in Iowa, Liz Garst and Darwin Pierce show what happens when one of the most productive farm regions in the world starts losing the ground it depends on.
Why this matters
Topsoil disappears quietly until the damage becomes impossible to ignore. A hard rain hits. Water moves across a field. Fine particles lift and wash. A creek turns brown. The farm still looks like a farm, yet some of its strength is already gone. At White Rock Conservancy, Liz Garst speaks about that loss with unusual urgency because she has seen both the history and the stakes. Iowa is often imagined as inexhaustibly fertile, yet she says the state has already lost half its topsoil since farming began there. In a place built on deep black soil, that is more than an agronomy problem. It is a food-system warning.
“We have lost in Iowa half our topsoil since we started farming.”
Liz puts that loss in a bigger frame by talking about rainfall. Heavy storms are becoming more intense, and when that kind of rain lands on weak soil structure, the land gives way. Dirt moves even on relatively flat ground. Gullies cut deeper. The damage spreads field by field, storm by storm. That is why her concern sounds moral as much as technical. Once the soil is gone, the system beneath food production is harder to rebuild than most people want to admit.
Iowa offers a warning the rest of the country should hear
The danger in Iowa is especially striking because this is not marginal land. This is some of the most celebrated farmland in the country. Liz points out how easy it is to destroy what looks impossible to ruin. The pattern she describes is familiar across industrial agriculture: corn and beans over and over, too much bare ground, too many months with nothing living in the soil, and too little food for the biology that gives the ground structure. She says healthy soil contains an elephant’s worth of living creatures per acre. Those organisms need something to feed on. When fields are left sterile for long stretches of the year, the entire system weakens.
That is where Darwin Pierce brings the proof down to field level. He manages real income-generating farm ground at White Rock Conservancy and compares a soybean field using cover crops with a neighboring field that does not. The difference he describes is physical. In the covered field, living roots and residue feed biology, build structure, and improve water infiltration. After major storms, he says there was no erosion. In the neighboring field, soil without that biological glue breaks apart more easily and behaves more like dust under rainfall pressure.
“One of the goals that we are trying to accomplish with the cover crops is to keep living roots on the ground as much as possible.”
What topsoil loss looks like before it becomes a crisis
The warning signs are not mysterious. They tend to show up the same way again and again:
- Long stretches of bare ground with little living cover
- Weak soil structure that breaks down under rain
- Runoff increasing instead of soaking in
- Erosion after storms that should have been manageable
- Fields that rely on disturbance instead of biological stability
Darwin’s side-by-side comparison makes those signals easier to understand. Cover crops are doing more than filling visual space between cash crops. They are feeding microbes, holding the soil together, and keeping roots active when a bare field would be shutting down. Liz calls cover crops insurance, especially against the kind of seven-inch rain that can permanently damage a plowed field. That word fits because the loss here is not theoretical. When topsoil leaves, it takes fertility, structure, water-holding capacity, and long-term productivity with it.
The cost reaches beyond the farm
Topsoil loss does not stay neatly contained inside the fence line. Sediment moves into waterways. Fertility leaves the field. More input is needed to prop up what biology once provided. The land becomes less resilient under both heavy rain and dry spells. That has consequences for yields, for water quality, and for the larger food system that depends on stable, productive ground. White Rock makes that connection feel immediate because it shows the problem on real farmland rather than in abstract charts.
Liz also makes a point many food conversations miss: the danger is cumulative. A single storm may not look like the end of anything. Decades of weak structure, bare soil, and repeated erosion can hollow out the future of a region that once seemed invulnerable. That is why topsoil loss deserves the word “emergency.” A food system cannot remain strong while the ground beneath it is being steadily carried away.
The ground under the future of food
White Rock Conservancy offers a clear lesson. The future of food depends on what happens to the soil between storms, between seasons, and between harvests. Liz Garst brings the warning. Darwin Pierce shows the field evidence. Together, they make the case that protecting topsoil is not a side issue for farmers alone. It is one of the most practical, immediate ways to protect the long-term strength of the food system itself. The land can still hold on if it is managed to stay alive. The question is how long people will wait to act like that ground matters.
