Along the eastern bank of the picturesque Iowa River, the Petty’s cow/calf, cattle-feeding, and crop 
operation stretches for seven miles between Eldora and Union and spans nearly three thousand acres. About half of the land is rented from twenty neighbors; Petty and his wife, Diane, own the rest. Dave and three employees tend thirteen hundred acres of soybeans and corn (most corn is fed as supplemental rations to cattle), with the rest of the land in pasture and hay. In addition to the cow/calf and cattle-feeding operations, they finish about one thousand hogs each year for market.
Conservation practices abound on the Petty’s family farm—and so do the wildlife, including deer, ducks, and pheasants. The first three miles of the farm is native timber, which the Petty family has preserved for hiking, horseback riding, family camping, canoeing, and fishing. Then the land opens up to rolling hills, wooded ravines, and river bottomland, perfect for grazing the Petty’s five-hundred-head Angus herd. By renting from neighbors and buying land as it has become available, Dave has pieced together twenty-two paddocks, all connected with their own source of water.
The system Dave has established allows cattle to be moved from one area to another, grazing in pastures or in fields of leftover cornstalks nearly ten months of the year. By rotational grazing, Dave keeps the grass at its maximum vegetative or growing height of about four inches. Shorter grass can become overgrazed and taller grass goes to seed and loses its nutritive value.
“You get two free things in this business—sunlight and rain,” explains Dave. “If you let the grass get too tall, you waste all that sun and rain.” Dave moves his animals about every week, depending on the weather and the age of the cattle. Each pasture might be grazed three times during the year.
Although he grew up in nearby Union, Dave’s parents quit farming when he was in high school. In 1974, he began working for an area farmer after attending Hawkeye Community College in Waterloo. That same year he struck out on his own, buying ten cows and renting pasture from a neighbor.
“I began renting small pastures when no one else wanted to do that,” Dave explains. “Commodity 
prices were high and everyone wanted to raise corn and soybeans. Much of this land along the river was rough ground and not suited to farming.”
Each time he added a new property, he made improvements. He cleaned out scrub brush. He reshaped waterways, improved drainage, and built holding ponds protected by uphill terraces. Dave reseeded pastures and turned marginal crop fields into forage. He interplanted with high-quality red clover and birdsfoot trefoil when the ground was still covered with frost so that growth could begin with the spring thaw.
“We’ve tried to respect the land and treat it as our own,” Dave says. “I really think neighboring farmers watched what I did with other people’s property, and then they would rent their marginal land to me too.”
Some improvements have been extensive. In one pasture, Dave drilled a new well, laid four thousand feet of underground water line, and plans to add another two thousand feet. When completed, the system will provide six watering areas for cattle.
“When I started, this pasture had a washout large enough to park a semitrailer truck in it,” he says, pointing to a field which now has only gentle curves. Even in early August the field is bright green with new clover. “The cattle probably think they’re in heaven to have fresh clover this time of year,” he remarks.
Dave estimates that in cooperation of the Natural Resource Conservation Service, he has built thirteen miles of terraces on the crop ground, installed twelve miles of drainage, reshaped more than eleven miles of waterways and seeded three miles of buffer strips.
Dave uses conservation in other ways too. He uses minimum tillage, practices contour farming, and applies manure from his feedlot operation as fertilizer for corn crops. He also plants grass in headland areas around cornfields, which is baled once during the season to keep the grass growing. By the time the corn crop is harvested, the grass provides other nutrients to cattle that graze cornstalks.
These efforts helped Dave win the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Region III Environmental 
Stewardship Award, and then be named the national winner among seven regions. Also in 2002, Dave received the Environmental Protection Agency’s Regional Administrator’s Award for Environmental Excellence, the first given to a farmer.
Dave has been active in the Iowa Cattlemen’s Association, serving two times as its president. During those terms he helped lead a new producer cooperative that sought to operate its own slaughter plant in Iowa. With nearly a thousand producers on board, Dave is confident their work will someday capture a market in Japan.
“The key is to keep an operation small enough so that farmers can still make their own management decisions,” explains Dave. He is proud that he has built his operation on good relationships with his neighbors and did not take over anyone else’s business. “I built it on my own, and that’s why I have a burning desire to keep it together,” he says.
“Farming also needs to be fun,” says Dave, which is why the Pettys have added a primitive campground near the river in a portion of native timber. The land often becomes a weekend gathering spot for picnics, hikes, trail rides, canoeing, hayrides, campfires, and fishing expeditions for their extended family that includes sixteen nieces and nephews under age eight.
Almost every evening in the fall, Dave walks a half-mile trail from his house to the river just to enjoy the place. “There was a time when you used to have fun in agriculture, but people seem to have forgotten about that,” Dave says. “We’ve tried to add some fun into our operation.”