Michael Dahlstrom, assistant professor in the Greenlee School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Iowa State University, was part of the first-place team winning the Women, Food and Ag Network’s annual Media Awards competition in the Curriculum category.
The Iowa-based team created the curriculum manual, "Women Caring for the Land: Improving Conservation Outreach to Female Non-Operator Farmland Owners," to help landowners see how their land fits into the larger landscape, said Dahlstrom.
“My contribution to the project involved working with Jean Eells to design and write an activity,” he said. “We tested this activity against control groups and found the process to successfully help landowners think beyond human scale, which is a challenge faced by all groups and professions.”
Women landowners own half of the land in Iowa but have been left out of the national conversation around land use for a while, said Dahlstrom. This award recognizes the problem and the manual provides ways to solve the situation. WFAN developed the Women Caring for Land program in 2009 to serve female non-operator landowners interested in conservation.