About Us
Not only do we help farmers produce and market profitably,
we help them reach their conservation goals at the same time.
Our Team
Ruth McCabe
Senior Conservation Agronomist, CCA, CPAg
Will Hoffmann
Conservation Agronomist
Emery Davis
Conservation Agronomist
Joe Vonnahme
Precision Ag and GIS Specialist
Matt Vonnahme
Precision Ag Specialist
Kristin Schmit
Executive Administrative Assistant & Communication Specialist
Thomas Fawcett
Director, Environmental Resources and
Precision Ag
Our Mission
With over 40 years of combined experience in conservation and precision farming, our team is dedicated to serving the needs of our farmers as we work together to achieve an effective and profitable operation. We offer technical assistance on implementing a suite of conservation practices, as well as extensive knowledge about available cost-share programs to help reduce or eliminate barriers to conservation farming.
Our skillset ranges from conservation nutrient application, cover cropping, edge-of-field practices, no-till and strip-till farming, prairie restoration, wetland and oxbow consulting, and watershed management experience. Every farm in Iowa has unique challenges and unique operators and it's our team’s job to make conservation farming accessible to everyone, no matter where they fall on the conservation spectrum!
Our Conservation History
In 1993, Heartland Co-0p formed their first Conservation Team. Heartland Co-op has a long past of using our financial and human capital to engage in water quality improvement efforts. In 2020, in order to meet increasing demand from our members for help in adopting conservation farming practices, we stepped up our conservation game by becoming the first cooperative in the state of Iowa to hire Conservation Agronomists to our staff. The Conservation Agronomists bring value not only to Heartland Co-op members, but to all of Iowa and the Midwest by working directly with Iowa growers to improve our adoption of conservation practices.
A great example of this is our support for the use of cover crops - which can improve the water holding capacity of soil and remove excess nutrients like nitrates before the water enters the drainage system. In turn, this makes it easier and less costly for cities to treat their drinking water. Bringing this discussion closer to where we stand today, Heartland Co-op partnered on the installation of a bioreactor and saturated buffer strip in the Four Mile Watershed which, like Badger Creek, is also a part of the Des Moines River Watershed. Heartland is a founding member of Iowa’s Agriculture Clean Water Alliance (ACWA) and has supported the promotion and adoption of conservation on Iowa’s farms for decades. Our team’s primary goals are to deliver tailored conservation solutions to every farmer who works with us and to increase access to cost-share programming for farmers through Iowa-based, public-private partnerships. Our team works hard every day to meet the goals set forth by the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy, which is Iowa’s best framework for saving our state’s valuable topsoil and reducing farmer’s valuable nutrient loss to our waterways.
