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Iowa Learning Farms’ June Webinar Offers Views of Water Quality Solutions

AMES, Iowa — The Iowa Learning Farms’ monthly webinar will be Wednesday, June 19, at 11:30 a.m., and features Lois Wright Morton, sociology professor at Iowa State University. Her presentation is titled “Linking and Integrating Water Quality Planning for Action.” The webinar is part of a free series, hosted by ILF, through Adobe Connect. The series is on the third Wednesday of each month. A computer with Internet access is all that is needed to participate.

Water is a critical issue for the continued development and prosperity of Iowa, the North Central Region and the United States. Agencies including the United States Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Natural Resources, Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, and Iowa State University Extension and Outreach have actively funded and are engaged in a variety of water programs designed to address the complex water concerns faced in Iowa. Each of these partners has distinct missions, goals and public mandates. The challenge is to link and integrate how issues are framed, subsequent planning for better stakeholder understanding, and to motivate learning and action that leads to improved water quality.

Lois Wright Morton received her Ph.D. in development sociology at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. She is currently a professor of sociology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Iowa State University. Morton’s areas of research include civic structure, social connections and human dimensions of natural resource management, performance-based agricultural environmental management in local watersheds, impacts of long-term weather change on agricultural land use management, rural communities and rural quality of life. Her most recent book, Pathways to Better Water Quality: The Citizen Effect (2011) focuses on farmer-led watershed management and citizen solutions to agricultural nonpoint source pollution and represents a summary of her water quality research and extension work. Morton is the project director for several grants including the nine-state USDA climate and corn-based cropping system coordinated agricultural project (2011-2016), the four-state Heartland Integrated Regional Water Coordination project, and Developing Local leadership and Extension Capacity for Performance-based Agricultural Environmental Management.

To connect to the webinars, go to https://connect.extension.iastate.edu/ilf/. Morton will be able to answer questions from webinar “attendees” via the Adobe Connect chat box. The ILF website contains links for archived webinars from previous months at http://www.extension.iastate.edu/ilf/Webinars/. The webinar archive also will be available in a podcast through iTunes.

Iowa Learning Farms is a partnership of the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Iowa Natural Resources Conservation Service and Iowa Department of Natural Resources (USEPA section 319); in cooperation with Conservation Districts of Iowa, the Iowa Farm Bureau and the Iowa Water Center.

Source: Iowa State University Extension


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