Helen DeElda Gunderson is a fourth-generation farmland owner who began managing over 500 acres of inherited land in 1997, embarking on a deep and intentional learning process enriched by the breadth of her work and life experiences. It’s impossible to weave here all the strands that together tell the story of Helen’s land stewardship journey.…

Updated July 2023 Sylvia Spalding brings a unique background to Climate Land Leaders. A long-time resident of Honolulu, she spent a career in fisheries management in the Pacific Islands and today is bringing insights from that career to her stewardship of family land in Mahaska County, Iowa. Her family’s history in Mahaska dates back to…

Totaling $428 billion in funding, the Farm Bill includes nutrition programs like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) that provide food access for low-income families, risk management programs like crop insurance and disaster assistance, resources for starting and growing a farming operation, and support for conservation and sustainable farming practices on land. The next Farm Bill…

Dear Friends, Glenn and I begin to feel like farmers – you know, those sturdy people who have to brave all kinds of weather to plant their crops and feed their animals no matter what! Despite six (yes, 6!) inches of rainfall in Minnesota this past weekend we managed to plant 250 trees in a riparian buffer and 26…

Each year Climate Land Leaders commit to on-farm conservation steps that will result in reduced emissions, carbon drawdown, improved water quality, increased biodiversity and improved human well-being on their land and in their communities. This year’s array of goals is ambitious and inspiring, including: making changes in cultivation and grazing practices on working lands; reintroduction…

Climate Land Leaders are big users of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) — and full of opinions about the program’s benefits and how it could be improved. CRP is a non-working lands program,” Maggie McQuown, Resilient Farms, Red Oak, Iowa, explains. “In other words, land with a five-year, or more, cropping history is taken out…

Wendy Johnson recently presented at the 2022 Sustainable Farming Association Annual Conference. Wendy Johnson is a farmer and climate land leader stewarding land that is the ancestral home of the Ioway, Wahpeton, Oceti Sakowin Sioux, Sauk, Meskwaki, and Winnebago peoples. Wendy’s relationship with this land goes back to her great-grandparents, German immigrants who after years…  Read More →

In early 2020, we were planning the final details of an in-person launch of Climate Land Leaders. And then COVID hit. We quickly moved the launch to Zoom, and, in March, a group of 20 gathered to share about the land they owned, the conservation they had completed — and their plans to do more.…

Matthew Fitzgerald is a well-known farmer in Minnesota for his work with beginning farmer policy issues, but most of his time is spent stewarding land and raising healthy organic grains — with an eye toward our increasingly volatile climate. Matthew grows corn, soybeans, wheat and edible peas and beans near Hutchinson, Minnesota. The farm has…

Climate Land Leader Paula Westmoreland talks about her history with Iowa farmland and her plans to devote the proceeds of that land’s sale to regeneration and equity. I grew up on a farm in the prairie pothole region of northwestern Iowa near Storm Lake. Dad bought 240 acres in 1955 and by the time I…