Lisa Jackson

One hundred fifty years ago – just two months after the creation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture – President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, a historic measure that created the land-grant university system. Twenty-eight years later, Congress enacted a second Morrill Act to establish African...

An August 18 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, ‘Obama on the Farm’, missed the underlying fact: the Obama administration understands that America’s farmers are some of our nation’s finest conservationists, and we have gone to historic lengths to support them in these efforts. Sadly, rumors...

At Monty Collins' cattle operation near Pleasantville, a rotational grazing system helps protect soil and water quality. A few miles away near Prairie City, Gordon Wassenaar has used no-till farming and a precision sprayer for years to minimize pesticide use and runoff from his soybean fields. We...

I recently had the pleasure of spending a day with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson as we toured rural Iowa seeing first-hand the ways farmers are helping protect our nation’s air and water resources.

There is an excitement at USDA with respect to bioenergy and biofuels and much is going on – a BIOFRENZY if you will – not in a sense of chaos – but rather many challenges and much to do. The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2) provisions of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 will be...