While agriculture’s importance to Iowa is unquestioned, there are those who have negative attitudes toward agriculture often because they don’t understand today’s farming.

"Your biggest, most important industry is agriculture, but you and I both know there are many people in this state that do not support agriculture and have accepted the negative attitudes of anti-ag people, environmental zealots that say that agriculture is bad …; we know it’s wrong," Jay Lehr, a futurist and economist, told Iowa Farm Bureau members at the 95th annual meeting held in Des Moines last week. Lehr is a senior...