SIOUX CITY, Iowa — In the midst of sprawling corn and soybean fields, industrial animal-processing plants and ethanol refineries, Woodbury County is charting an unusual course. It’s trying to go whole-hog into organic agriculture.

“This is a totally new direction for us,” said Debi Durham, president and CEO of the Siouxland Chamber of Commerce. “We are an agribusiness economy, but there is room for an alternative lifestyle.”

Durham added, “Within the next 10 years, we will be known as the organic capital — of the world.”

Such a prediction is almost mind-boggling, considering that the county had not one registered acre of organic farmland in the 2007 U.S. Department of Agriculture census — and this in a county with a total 450,000 acres of farmland.

The area has moved slightly toward organics since then. It now has some 400 acres certified organic and six organic farmers. The force behind the effort is Rob Marqusee, a 58-year-old California transplant who serves as the county’s rural economic development director.

By packaging tax incentives for organic farmers with aggressive promotion of locally grown food, Marqusee is trying to use family farming as an economic engine for shuttered stores on Main Street and shriveled rural school districts. “If you cannot make an economy based on the richest land in the world,” he said, “then you’re never going to make it.”

Most rural economic development projects focus on luring new industries or expanding infrastructure for water, electricity or broadband, but Woodbury County’s are aimed at creating a local food culture in an area that imports almost all of its food — despite its base of powerful agribusinesses.