Green Lands Blue Waters (GLBW) is a collaborative initiative focused on shifting the agricultural landscape of the Upper Mississippi River Basin to more acres of marketable continuous living cover (CLC) to improve water quality and soil health; agricultural, community, and farmer resilience; and the long-term stability of the Basin to the Gulf of Mexico. GLBW operates in partnership with land grant and other universities and environmental/agricultural agencies and nonprofits in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, and Louisiana. GLBW is a soft-funded center at the University of Minnesota and works as a connector, collaborator, convener, communicator - working with multiple cross-sector partners and serving a practitioner audience across the region; translating research to practice; focusing on opportunities and challenges that partners identify, but cannot tackle alone; and co-creating joint projects. GLBW focuses on systems-level levers for landscape-scale change - education, research and outreach, technical assistance, markets and value chains, policy, next gen farmers and farmer support,
and changing narratives and mindsets.