Balance all three: Food, biofuels, conservation

This Guest Column by Matt Liebman appeared in the Des Moines Register on May 23, 2008.

The controversy erupting over food and biofuel production generally overlooks the critical need to conserve and protect soil, water and wildlife. When conservation is considered, the implicit message is often this: In a hungry world, or in a fuel-deficient world, we simply can't afford the luxury of forgoing crop production by idling land for conservation purposes.

But can we really afford to abandon conservation? More...

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Matt Liebman is the Henry A. Wallace Endowed Chair for Sustainable Agriculture and a professor of agronomy at Iowa State University.