I’m a proud Wisconsinite, and I bleed as red for the Badgers, Bucks, Brewers and Packers as anyone. But at the moment, I’m green — with envy.

For two years, I’ve admired the gumption and foresight that Iowans demonstrated in 2017 in creating a program to help their farmers and protect their precious heritage of rich prairie soils. Like Wisconsin, these soils — some of the richest on the globe — are subject to erosion, and Iowans worried about the rate at which they were eroding. They were conscious that crops for which their state is known — corn and soybeans — leave the soil particularly subject to erosion, leaving a lot of Iowa farmland uncovered during vulnerable points of the year.