I was hoping that as Iowa abandoned different railways the last half century, that the state would purchase the right of ways and turn them into shelter belts, or at least subsidize the farmers’ who had owned the land, to so turn them. It would have been good all around.
But it’s a hard thing to get done with land that is worth $10-$20k an acre as crop land. Farmers can’t even leave four feet of cover along a fence line, which is why in NW Iowa, it truly is a biological desert.
